Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/286

260 with God, and wishes to free the soul from the body and its earthly shackles. He longs for repose, repose of the soul, and finds it in mysticism.

Mystical exclusiveness readily becomes pathological, the attention being hypnotised by a single object; contemplation rises into ecstasy, with its peculiar feelings of blissfulness.

The mystic despises the empirical, the conceptual cognition, which advances step by step, for he is impatient, and desires at one stride to attain to the highest cognition; the mystic contemplates God and objects. In this aspiration towards complete knowledge, the mystic gladly adopts the results of cognition; he cherishes traditionalism; revelation is welcome to him as a complete doctrine. The mystic rejects logic and methodology; he seeks the desert, the hermitage, and the cloister, with their artificial solitude, for there he can embrace mysticism as a permanent condition. The mystics have cultivated their own peculiar and quasi-pathological methods for the attainment of the mystical state in its completeness.

Mysticism makes its appearance in the earlier stages of civilisation. Speaking generally, we may say that as the centuries pass mysticism becomes weaker and rarer. Solov'ev finds it necessary to fall back upon the neoplatonists and upon Plato, whilst he gives his approval to the religious imbeciles (jurodivyi) of his own land. Obviously, certain times and certain places will display a greater inclination to mysticism than will others.

Mysticism is an outcome of a mythical outlook on the universe, and therefore thrives best in the theological and religious domain. The new critical and empirical philosophy and science exercise a debilitating influence upon myth and mysticism.

Criticism; scientific specialised training with its complete subjection of miracle to law and consequent rejection of miracle; scientific analysis of all so-called mysterious phenomena (hypnotism, spiritualism, etc.); technological efficiency, which replaces and outbids miracle; the universal need to labour; the doing away with idle aristocracy; the general restlessness and haste of economically developed and civilised life; the characteristics of urban existence; finally, the great diffusion and educative influence of literature and art, supplementing and mitigating intellectualism, and thus rendering mysticism superfluous—such are the chief factors by which we can explain the decline of mysticism and the decay of myth.