Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/194

Rh of every finite effort to express the reality, can now only ask you: For what else but this Absolute within the gate, within the knowing heart, smaller than the mustard seed, yet vaster than the heavens, — for what else can you seek? He simply defies you to find other definition of Being than this. And herewith you have his whole case presented.

I have dwelt so long upon the Upanishads, because, as I have said, they contain already the entire story of the mystic faith, so far as it had a philosophical basis. The rest of its story is not any part of philosophy. Endlessly repeated in history, perhaps often independently rediscovered elsewhere, the dialectic of Mysticism has nowhere any essentially different tale to tell, nor any other outcome to record. How in Europe Plotinus combined the mystical theory of the One with realistic, and in some respects with still deeper and often more constructively idealistic, conceptions of the constitution of the world from the Nous downward; how the Christian faith took to its heart the stranger doctrine whose original home was in India, until the faith of the Middle Ages became half a Mysticism; how the heretics used the mysterious light of the same teaching to guide them into forbidden paths; how the devotional books and the poets have taught to the laity many of the formulas that one first finds in the Upanishads — all this I have already very vaguely sketched in a former lecture. But to narrate the tale of the mere historical fortunes of Mysticism would require volumes, but would introduce