prophecy, then we should have to say that the scientific understanding of such experiences brought with it incapacity to reproduce them. But we have found, on the contrary, that psychological studies, in fact, have this effect only upon prophecy of the crude and primitive type, and upon that later development of it which claims to give knowledge of times and worlds out of the reach of the mind of man, claims disproved by the mere passage of time, and still more by the mind's growing mastery of the mysteries of the physical universe. The study of the religious experiences of the great prophets, if conducted with sympathy and reverence, has quite the opposite and an altogether favorable effect upon the religious life. We cannot, indeed, put ourselves back into their ways of thinking, any more than into the actual experiences of Israel with which they had to do. But our modern studies re-discover the prophets as men great in those qualities of character and spirit which do not change from age to age. We need, and sha'l always need, as Arnold says, the inspiration of their enthusiasm for the power that makes for righteousness. We need, also, as Arnold could not say, the inspiration of their intimacy with the personal God, the assurance of their friendship with the great Friend.

These prophets were great personalities. It is because their truth was true in themselves, truly incarnated in their spirits, that it had freshness and vitality, and was new however often it might have been said before. It is for the same reason that others could not but feel and know the truth of their words, however radical and counter to their wishes and interests and habits they were. And again the same fact, that they were themselves their message, was the secret of its power to work out its realization in events. Newness, persuasiveness, and creative power, belong to truth that is embodied in persons.

But the prophets did not set out to be great personalities,

and never thought of viewing their prophetic calling as a way to personal influence and power. On the contrary they became great only by the renunciation of greatness. It is of them that the truth is preeminently true that one who loses himself shall find himself. No prophet can choose or achieve the prophet's calling by himself; nor can he exercise prophetic gifts for himself. He is chosen and called by God, and he is sent to his fellow men. He is God's messenger and agent, and does not even speak in his own name. His "Thus saith the Lord" is not self-assertion or a high self-consciousness, it is self-denial in complete subjection to the thought and will of the Eternal. And if his self-consciousness is lost in God-consciousness on the one side, it passes over on the other into national consciousness. The prophets do and sacrifice, they pray and hope, for their nation; and at times assume even in action the very character and personality of the nation (comp. Hos. 1-3, Isa. 20, Jer. 27-28, Ezek. 4, 24: 15-27). Yet in spite of this loss of self in God and for him, and in and for their nation, or rather, precisely because of this loss, and in and through it, they find so large and great a self that we can scarcely look at them as human, and doubt our right to understand their experience or to look for any parallel to it in our own. We are not, indeed, understanding nor in any measure sharing the religious experience of the prophets unless we know what it means to lose ourselves in God, and to lose ourselves in our fellow men, and by this double loss of self to find our true selves and to realize our higher selves. Something of this we do no doubt experience whenever in our search for truth or in our response to beauty or to high ideals of virtue we are conscious of a higher and divine realm of worth and of reality, from which we come, to which we belong, which we too rarely perceive or possess, or in any vivid sense feel to be ourselves. And, on the other hand, none of us can be without some experience of

that other larger self, the society of our fellow men, revealed to us by the instincts of self-denial in service and of disinterestedness in loyalty and devotion.

It is such experiences that teach us the true nature of the mysticism of the prophets. It is such experiences to which we are helped and in them confirmed and strengthened more than by any other means by those holy souls into whom has entered more abundantly and in whom has remained in more abiding power that Holy Spirit which loves to make of men friends of God and prophets.

MYSTICISM IN INDIA

EDWARD WASHBURN HOPKINS

If mysticism included all that is mysterious, it were possible to find it in almost every Hindu cult and to trace it back to the earliest literature. There is, for example, the Vedic wild Muni, who probably reflects a mystic rapprochement with divinity, analogous to that of the dancing dervish; there is the mystic communion established by the Vedic sacrifices (especially to the Manes), in which the worshipper receives divine power through a commensal meal; there is the (epic) hypnotic trance, in which the operator compels the obedience of the subject by what is regarded as a mystic power; and finally there is the Brahmanic apocalyptic mysticism, which begins with a vision of the world to come and culminates in the visit of Naciketas to the realm of death. This last form is of some historical interest because may have led eventually to the vision of Arda Virâf, which in turn has been supposed to be the (Sassanid) model of the Divina Commedia.1

it

But these forms of "mysticism" must here be passed over allusively; nor need we linger to explain the "pantheistic mystic speculation" of the Rig Veda poets, who in x. 29 have derived Being from Not-Being through the agency of heat and desire, which is the "primal seed of mind," and in x. 90 describe the world as caused by the sacrifice of the Divine Man, whose body in part is the world itself. Of

1In regard to the curious case of epic hypnotism see the writer's article on Yoga technique in the Jour. Am. Orient. Soc. XXII (1901). After RV. x. 135, the Taittirîya Brâhmana iii. 11, 8, gives a vision of the next world, later elaborated in the Kathâ Upanishad.

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such naïve (not profound) speculation there is a plenty in the Vedic age, early and late. For our purpose they are negligible, since the mysticism we are examining is of another sort, namely that which is exhibited in the ineffable but transient state of the soul at one with the divine (or with its supranormal equivalent), the soul being either intellectually or emotionally intuitive of, or identified with, the world

power.

Five divisions of the subject appear as the phenomena show themselves in history: First, in the mystics of the Upanishads. Second, in the early Buddhistic mystics. Third, in the scientific Yoga. Fourth, in a blending of Brahmanic and later Buddhistic mysticism. Fifth, in the mediæval emotional mystics.

In the first four of these divisions we have to do not so much with individuals as with schools, forms of religious faith, general, not, as in the isolated cases of mysticism known to us by the names Plotinus, Francis, etc., special abnormal phenomena, but systematically induced and perfectly controlled states. Even in the Theragâthâs of the early Buddhists, although they antedate our known systems, the individual appears to be working under a system, and the name attached to the special aññâ or gnosis, is without historical value.

The object of all Brahmanic and Buddhist mysticism is to escape from life as it is into a state mystically conceived as larger and better, to escape from the bonds of individuality into the unbound, from the limitation of time into the eternal, albeit that escape may bring with it the renunciation of personality. Theistically expressed, man seeks union with God not by going to him but by realizing him, the realization itself being identical with the attainment. He who knows Brahma becomes Brahma. This is perhaps no more than the logical extension of early Vedic identification of the microcosm with the macrocosm, but it expresses itself otherwise and indeed in