As the mystics have always said that God was not
far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
discerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those
aspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the
same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's
consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
more or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be
once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,
mind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
life, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,
aesthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,
the life of reason is that which some people may prefer.
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