Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/100

Rh That meanwhile the mystic is a very abstract sort of person, I well admit. But he is usually a keen thinker. Only he uses his thinking sceptically, to make naught of other thinkers. He gets his reality not by thinking, but by consulting the data of experience. He is not stupid. And he is trying, very skilfully, to be a pure empiricist. Indeed, I should maintain that the mystics are the only thorough-going empiricists in the history of philosophy.

In its origin, and in its greatest representatives, Mysticism appears in history as the conception of men whose piety has been won after long conflict, whose thoughts have been dissected by a very keen inner scepticism, whose single-minded devotion to an abstraction has resulted from a vast experience of the painful complications of life, and whose utter empiricism is the outcome of a severe discipline, whereby they have learned to distrust ideas. The technical philosophical mystics are the men who, in general, began by being realists. They learned to doubt. They have doubted through and through. Whenever they choose to appear as discursive thinkers, they are keen and merciless dialecticians. Their thinking as such is negative. What they discover is that Realism is infected, so to speak, by profound contradictions. Hereby they are led to a new view of what it is to be. This view asserts, first, that of course the real is what makes ideas true or false. But, as the mystic continues, owing to certain essential defects of the process of ideation, experience shows that explicit ideas, of human, perhaps of any type, are always profoundly false, just in so far as they are always partial, fleeting, contradictory, dialectical, disunited. The thinking