e a
certain austerity, impetuosity, and intensity of life. This vigour,
however, is seldom lasting; fanaticism dries its own roots and becomes,
when traditionally established, a convention as arbitrary as any fashion
and the nest for a new brood of mean and sinister habits. The Pharisee
is a new worldling, only his little world is narrowed to a temple, a
tribe, and a clerical tradition.

Mysticism, as its meditative nature comports, is never so pernicious,
nor can it be brought so easily round to worldliness again. That its
beneficent element is purely natural and inconsistent with a denial of
will, we shall have occasion elsewhere to observe. Suffice it here to
point out, that even if a moral nihilism could be carried through and
all definite interests abandoned, the vanity of life would not be
thereby corrected, but merely exposed. When our steps had been retraced
to the very threshold of being, nothing better worth doing would have
been discovered on the way. That to suffer illusion is a bad thing might
ordinarily be taken for an axiom, because ordinarily we assume that true
knowledge and rational volition are possible; but if this assumption is
denied, the value of retracting illusions is itself impeached. When
vanity is represented as universal and salvation as purely negative,
every one is left free to declare that it is vain to renounce vanity and
sinful to seek salvation.

This result, fantastic though it may at first sight appear, is one which
mysticism actually comes to under certain circumstances. Absolute
pessimism and absolute optimism are opposite sentiments attached to a
doctrine identically the same. In either case no improvement is
possible, and the authority of human ideals is denied. To escape, to
stanch natural wounds, to redeem society and the private soul, are then
mistaken and pitiable ambitions, adding to their vanity a certain touch
of impiety. One who really believes that the world's work is all
providentially directed and that whatever happens, no matter how
calamitous or shocking, happens by divine right, has a quietistic
excuse for license; to check energy by reason, and seek to limit and
choose its path, seems to him a puny rebellion against omnipotence,
which works through madness and crime in man no less than through
cataclysms in outer nature. Every particular desire is vain and bound,
perhaps, to be defeated; but the mystic, when caught in the expansive
mood, accepts this defeat itsel