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190 with the subject ought to know merely as a matter of general education.

And the mystic further observes that, despite all this, you have not now won, as finite thinker, the true presence of the very Being which you seek and which you still contain within your very meaning. He points out that, in your present poor form of self-consciousness, just now, you find within you what you do not wholly mean, and mean, as if it were beyond you, a truth that, although it is nigh you, even in your heart, you do not at present find. He insists that your finite disquietude is due to your restlessness in this essentially intolerable situation. He advises you that, in looking for Being, you are attempting to end this disquietude. Now in all this the mystic is distinctly an empiricist, a reporter of the facts, as you can at any moment see them for yourself if you will. Moreover, he is a decidedly practical thinker.

But as a religious teacher he is inspiring, first of all, just because he appeals to your own individuality. He breathes the common spirit of all the higher religions when he conceives your goal as an inner salvation, and your search for truth as essentially a practical effort to win personal perfection. It is no wonder then that the mystics have been the spiritual counsellors of humanity. Where the realist falsely sunders the what and the that, the outer world and the individual soul, the theoretical and the practical interests, the mystic sees the unity of life’s business, identifies the needful and the true, unites the moral Ought with the theoretical Ideal, teaches that the absolutely Real, by virtue of its very function as the Real, must also be the absolutely Good, gives life a