on the subject." No writer had more influence upon the growth of
Mysticism in the Church than Dionysius the Areopagite, whose main
object is to present Christianity in the light of a Platonic
mysteriosophy. The same purpose is evident in Clement, and in other
Christian Platonists between Clement and Dionysius. See Appendix B.]

[Footnote 7: It should also be borne in mind that every historical
example of a mystical movement may be expected to exhibit
characteristics which are determined by the particular forms of
religious deadness in opposition to which it arises. I think that it
is generally easy to separate these secondary, accidental
characteristics from those which are primary and integral, and that we
shall then find that the underlying substance, which may be regarded
as the essence of Mysticism as a type of religion, is strikingly
uniform.]

[Footnote 8: The analogy used by Plotinus (_Ennead_ i. 6. 9) was often
quoted and imitated: "Even as the eye could not behold the sun unless
it were itself sunlike, so neither could the soul behold God if it
were not Godlike." Lotze (_Microcosmus_, and cf. _Metaphysics_, 1st
ed., p. 109) falls foul of Plotinus for this argument. "The reality of
the external world is utterly severed from our senses. It is vain to
call the eye sunlike, as if it needed a special occult power to copy
what it has itself produced: fruitless are all mystic efforts to
restore to the intuitions of sense, by means of a secret identity of
mind with things, a reality outside ourselves." Whether the subjective
idealism of this sentence is consistent with the subsequent dogmatic
assertion that "nature is animated throughout," it is not my province
to determine. The latter doctrine is held by a large school of
mystics: the acosmistic tendency of the former has had only too much