solution. It can exist in a child, very likely in an animal; indeed,
to parody a phrase of Hegel's, the only pure mystics are the brutes.
When articulation fails in the face of experience; when instinct guides
without kindling any prophetic idea to which action may be inwardly
referred; when life and hope and joy flow through the soul from an
unknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Such
an experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordial
energies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just as
at the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yet
may have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earth
and sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at the
end, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulate
experience may be lifted up and carried down-stream bodily by the
elementary flood rising from beneath.

[Sidenote: It may recur at any stage of culture.]

Every religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject to
incidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone and be
the body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may say
so, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium and
interrupted growth; but in these pauses, when the depths rise to the
surface and obliterate what scratches culture may have made there, the
rhythm of life may be more powerfully felt, and the very disappearance
of intellect may be taken for a revelation. Both in a social and a
psychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt for
those fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they are
utterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. If they leave
something standing it is only by involuntary accident, and if they
prepare the soil for anything, it is commonly only for wild-flowers and
weeds. Revelations are seldom beneficent, therefore, unless there is
more evil in the world to destroy than good to preserve; and mysticism,
under the same circumstances, may also liberate and relieve the spirit.

[Sidenote: Form gives substance its life and value.]

The feelings which in mysticism rise to the surface and speak in their
own name are simply the ancient, overgrown feelings of vitality,
dependence, inclusion; they are the background of consciousness coming
forward and blotting out t