Now the essence of this view of the mystic is that to be real means to be felt as the absolute goal and consequent quietus of all thinking, and so of all striving. Or in other words, Reality is that which you immediately feel when, thought satisfied, you cease to think. The mystic is, as I said before, the only thoroughgoing empiricist. We owe to him an illustration of what an absolutely pure empiricism, devoid of conventions, and alone with immediacy, would mean. Ordinary empiricism only half loves the facts of experience, as facts; for it no sooner gets them than it gets outside of them, makes endless hypotheses about them, restlessly tries to explain them by ideal constructions, and, if realistic, forsakes them altogether to talk of independent beings. The mystic loves the simple fact, just so far as it is simple and unmediated, the absolute datum, with no questions to be asked. That alone, for him, is worthy of the name real. If it takes a trance to find such a fact, that is the fault of our human ignorance and baseness. The fact in question is always in you, is under your eyes. The ineffably immediate is always present. Only, in your blindness, you refuse to look at it, and prefer to think instead of illusions. The ineffably immediate is also, if you like, far above knowledge, but that is because knowledge ordinarily means contamination with ideas.
So much for the mystic’s conceptions of what it is to be. If you ask what to think of this conception, in comparison with the first, I answer at once that, as a more detailed study will show us, it is precisely as much and precisely as little a logically defensible conception as the
