we say simply, 'This is a great mystery.' I watched and
wondered until Jem called, and I had to leave the rippling weir
and the water's side, and the wheel with its untold secret."

There are certain forms, or modes, of experience here presented
which are at least mystical in their tendency--the sense of a
deeper reality than that which can be grasped by conscious
reason--a desire to penetrate a secret that will not yield itself to
articulate thought and which nevertheless leaves a definite
impress on the mind. There is also a recognition of the passive
attitude which the ordinary mystic doctrine avers to be essential
to vision. Will these features warrant our regarding the
experiences as genuinely mystical?

The answer to this question brings into bold relief a vital
difference between orthodox mystics and those here called
nature-mystics, and raises the issue on which the very existence
of a valid Nature Mysticism must depend. The stricter schools
would unhesitatingly refuse to accord to such experiences the
right to rank with those which result in true insight. Why?
Because they obviously rest on sense impressions. An English
mystic, for example, states in a recent article that Mysticism is
always and necessarily extra-phenomenal, and that the man who
tries to elucidate the visible by means of the invisible is no true
mystic; still less, of course, the man who tries to elucidate the
invisible by means of the visible. The true mystic, he says, fixes
his eyes on eternity and the infinite; he loses himself when he
becomes entangled in the things of time, that is, in the
phenomenal. Still more explicit is the statement of a famous
modern Yogi. "This world is a delusive charm of the great