the rapture of the poet, or (as Plato adds) of the lover.[29] And
even the philosopher or man of science may be surprised into some such
state by a sudden realisation of the sublimity of his subject. So at
least Lacordaire believed when he wrote, "All at once, as if by
chance, the hair stands up, the breath is caught, the skin contracts,
and a cold sword pierces to the very soul. It is the sublime which has
manifested itself![30]" Even in cases where there is evident
hallucination, e.g. when the visionary sees an angel or devil sitting
on his book, or feels an arrow thrust into his heart, there need be no
insanity. In periods when it is commonly believed that such things may
and do happen, the imagination, instead of being corrected by
experience, is misled by it. Those who honestly expect to see miracles
will generally see them, without detriment either to their
truthfulness or sanity in other matters.

The mystic, then, is not, as such, a visionary; nor has he any interest
in appealing to a faculty "above reason," if reason is used in its
proper sense, as the logic of the whole personality. The desire to find
for our highest intuitions an authority wholly external to reason and
independent of it,--a "purely supernatural" revelation,--has, as
Récéjac says, "been the cause of the longest and the most dangerous of
the aberrations from which Mysticism has suffered." This kind of
supernaturalism is destructive of _unity_ in our ideas of God, the
world, and ourselves; and it casts a slur on the faculties which are the
appointed organs of communication between God and man. A revelation
absolutely transcending reason is an absurdity: no such revelation could
ever be made. In the striking phrase of Macarius, "the human mind is the
throne of the Godhead." The supremacy of the reason is the favourite
theme of the Cambridge Platonists, two of whom, Whichcote and Culverwel,
are never tired of quoting the text, "The spirit of man is the candle of