ecstasy of religious emotion, of aesthetic delight, of creative
inspiration? It is not, however, religion or beauty or genius
that is the object of our inquiry at this moment, but simply
the common element in the experience of each of these which
we know as the disappearance of self-feeling. How the
circumstances peculiar to religious worship, aesthetic appreciation,
and intellectual creation bring about the formal conditions of
the loss of personal feeling must be sought in a more detailed
analysis, and we shall then be able to trace the source of the
intensity of emotion in these experiences. What, then, first
of all, are the steps by which priest and poet and thinker have
passed into the exaltation of selfless emotion? Fortunately,
the passionate pilgrims of all three realms of deep experience
have been ever prodigal of their confessions. The religious
ecstasy, however, embodies the most complete case, and allows
the clearest insight into the nature of the experience; and will
therefore be dealt with at greatest length.

The typical religious enthusiast is the mystic. From Plotinus
to Buddha, from Meister Eckhart to Emerson, the same doctrine
has brought the same fruits of religious rapture. There is one
God, and in contemplation of Him the soul becomes of his
essence. Whether it is held, as by the Neoplatonists, that
Being and Knowledge are one, that the procedure of the world
out of God is a process of self-revelation, and the return of
things into God a process of higher and higher intuition, and
so the mystic experience an apprehension of the highest rather
than a form of worship; or whether it is expressed as by the
humble Beguine, Mechthild,--"My soul swims in the Being of God
as a fish in water,'--the kernel of the mystic's creed is the