The champion of modern mysticism against rationalistic enlightenment is Hamann. He desires to know the content of the outer divine revelation vitally regenerated from the soil of his own spirit, and to find the solution of all contradictions in self-evident faith, which comes to him from feeling, from the immediate revelation of truth. What he shadowed forth Jacobi elaborated. He says (in various places): “Conviction by means of proofs is a second-hand certainty, rests on comparison, and can never be perfectly sure and complete. Now if every acceptation of truth which does not spring from rational grounds is faith, conviction from grounds of reason must itself come from faith, and receive its force solely from it.—He who knows must in the last resort depend on sensation or a feeling of the mind.—As there is a sensuous intuition through sense, so there is also a rational one through reason.—Each in its province is the final and unconditionally valid.—Reason, like the faculty of the feelings, is the incorporeal organ for the perceptions of the super-sensible. Rational intuition, although given in exalted feelings, is yet truly objective.—Without the positive rational feeling of a higher than the world of the senses, the understanding could never transgress the sphere of the conditioned.”
Fichte and Schelling accepted these views, whilst Kant in his categorical imperative only made use of them under the guise of formal knowledge of the understanding. Fichte says in the Introductory Lectures to the Theory of Science, “This doctrine presupposes an entirely new inner sense-organ through which a new world is given, that does not at all exist for the ordinary man. It is not exactly excogitating and creating a novelty, a something not already given, but the bringing together and reducing to unity of the given by means of a new and yet to be developed sense” This “Rational Faith” of Jacobi receives from Schelling its most appropriate name—intellectual intuition—which is set up by the latter as the indispensable organ of our transcendental philosophising, as the principle of all demonstration, and as the unprovable, self-evident ground of all evidence, in a word, as the absolute act of knowledge,—as a kind of cognition which must always remain incomprehensible from the conscious empirical point of view, because it has not like it an object, because it cannot at all appear in consciousness, but falls outside of it (comp. Schelling, I., I, pp. 181, 182). Thus have we followed this mode of attaining to the consciousness of a content from the crude figurative expression of a personal divine communication down to Schelling’s intellectual intuition, and have herein found that which makes a feeling or a thought mystical in form.
If we ask how we have to conceive this immediate knowledge through intellectual intuition, Fichte and Schelling give us answers on this point also. Fichte says, in the “Facts of Consciousness”:—“Man has in general nothing but experience, and he comes by everything whereto he attains only through experience, through life itself. In the theory of the sciences, too, as the absolute highest potency, above which no consciousness can rise, nothing can at all occur which does not lie in actual consciousness or in experience, in the highest sense of the term.” And Schelling corroborates (“Works,” ii. vol. i. p. 326):—“For, to be sure, there are also those who speak of thought as an antithesis to all experience, as if thought itself were not certainly also experience!” Immediate or mystical knowledge is here very well included in the notion, experience, because it is previously found “in actual consciousness” as given, without the will being able to make any change in it. No matter whether this datum is given from within or from without, conscious will has, in either case, nothing to do with it, and consciousness, to which its unconscious background is just as unconscious, must accordingly accept its inspirations as something extraneous, whence arises the belief in divine or demoniac inspiration of the intellectual intuition in earlier times, and among those untrained in philosophy. Since consciousness knows that it has not derived its knowledge directly or indirectly from sense-perception, thereby being pre-eminently immediate knowledge, it can only have arisen through inspiration from the Unconscious, and we have accordingly comprehended the essence of the mystical—as the filling of consciousness with a content (feeling, thought, desire) through involuntary emergence of the same from the Unconscious.
We must accordingly claim clairvoyance and presentiment as essentially mystical—a subdivision of mysticism, so far as it has reference to thought,—and shall not be able to avoid finding something mystical also in every instinct, namely, so far as the unconscious clairvoyance of instinct appears in consciousness as presentiment, faith, or certainty. I shall further meet with assent after these considerations and those of the earlier chapters, if, even in the most ordinary psychological processes, I characterise those thoughts and feelings as mystical in form, which owe their origin to an immediate intrusion of the Unconscious, thus before all the æsthetic feeling in contemplation and production, the origin of sensuous perception and the unconscious processes in thinking, feeling, and willing generally. This perfectly justifiable application meets with resistance only from vulgar prejudice, which sees marvel and mystery only in the extraordinary, but finds nothing obscure or marvellous in the things of every-day life—only because there is nothing rare and unusual in it. Certainly, one does not call a man, who only carries about in himself these ever-recurring mysteries, a mystic; for if this word is to mean more than human being, it must be reserved for the men who participate in the rarer phenomena of mysticism, namely, such inspirations of the Unconscious as go beyond the common need of the individual or of the race, e.g., clairvoyants, through spontaneous somnambulism or natural disposition, or persons with a darker but frequently active power of presentiment (Socrates’ “Daimonion”). I should also not object to the designating as mystics, in the province of their art, all eminent art-geniuses, who owe their productions predominantly to inspirations of their genius, and not to the work of their consciousness, be they in all other concerns of life as clear-headed as possible (e.g., Phidias, Æschylus, Raphael, Beethoven); and he alone could take offence who has himself so little of the mystical vein in him, that the incommensurability of the genuine work of art with any rationalistic standard, as well as the infinity of its content, in respect of all attempts at definition, has not yet at ail entered into his consciousness.
In philosophy I should like to extend the notion still further, and call every original philosopher a mystic, so far as he is truly original; for in the history of philosophy no high thought has ever been brought to light by laborious conscious trial and induction, but has always been apprehended by the glance of genius, and then elaborated by the understanding. Add to that, that philosophy essentially deals with a theme which is most intimately connected with the one feeling only to be mystically apprehended, namely, the relation of the individual to the Absolute. All that has gone before only concerned such matter of consciousness as can or could arise in no other way, thus is here only called mystical, because the form of its origin is mystical; but now we come to an item of consciousness, which, in its inmost character, is only to be apprehended mystically, which thus also, materially, may be called mystical; and a human being who can produce this mystical content will have to be called pre-eminently a mystic.
To wit, conscious thought can comprehend the identity of the individual with the Absolute by a rational method, as we too have found ourselves on the way to this goal in our inquiry; but the Ego and the Absolute and their identity stand before it as three abstractions, whose union in the judgment is made probable, it is true, through the preceding proofs, yet an immediate feeling of this identity is not attained by it. The authoritative belief in an external revelation may credulously repeat the dogma of such a unity—the living feeling of the same cannot be engrafted or thrust on the mind from without, it can only spring up in the mind of the believer himself; in a word, it is to be attained neither by philosophy nor external revelation, but only mystically, by one with equal mystical proclivities, the more easily, indeed, the more perfect and pure are the philosophical notions or religious ideas already possessed. Theref
ore this feeling is the content of mysticism, κατ’ έξoχὴv, because it finds its existence only in it, and, at the same time, the highest and ultimate, if also, as we have seen before, by no means the only aim of all those who have devoted their lives to mysticism. Nay, we may even go so far as to assert that the production of a certain degree of this mystical feeling, and the enjoyment lurking in it, is the sole inner aim of all religion, and that it is, therefore, not incorrect, if less significative, to apply the name religious feeling to it.
Further, if the highest blessedness lurks in this feeling for its possessor, as is confirmed by the experience of all mystics, the transition is manifestly easy to the endeavour to heighten this feeling in degree, by seeking to make the union between the Ego and the Absolute ever closer and more intimate. But it is also not difficult to see that we have here arrived at the point previously indicated, where mysticism spontaneously degenerates into the morbid, by overshooting its mark. Undoubtedly we must elevate ourselves for this purpose a little above the standpoint hitherto attained in our investigations. The unity, namely of the Absolute and the individual, whose individuality or egoity is given through consciousness, thus, in other words, the unity of the unconscious and conscious, is once for all given, inseparable and indestructible, except by destruction of the individual; wherefore, however, every attempt to make this unity more close than it is, is so absurd and useless. The way which, historically, has almost always been taken, is that of the annihilation of consciousness—the endeavour to let the individual perish in the Absolute. This, however, contains a great error, as if, when the goal of annihilation of consciousness was reached, the individual still existed; the Ego at once desires to be annihilated, and to subsist in order to enjoy this annihilation. Consequently this goal has hitherto been always only imperfectly attained on both sides, although the accounts of the mystics enable us to perceive that many on this path have attained an admirable height, or rather depth, so that I shall adduce a few illustrations. (True self-annihilation is, of course, only suicide; but here the contradiction is too patent for it to have often been the result of mysticism.)
Michael Molinos, the father of Quietism, says, among the eight-and-sixty propositions of his celebrated “Spiritual Guide,” condemned by Innocent VI.:—“Man must annihilate his powers, and the soul annihilates itself when it ceases to effect anything. And if the soul has attained the mystical death, it can—having now returned to its fundamental cause, to God—will nothing further than what God wills.” The mystics of the earlier part of the Middle Ages distinguish in different ways a greater or smaller number of stages; the last is always absorption, the same state as we already find described among the Buddhist gymnosophists, the modern Persian Ssufis, and the Hesychasts or quietists or Omphalists of Mount Athos. It is said that in absorption the human being is no longer aware of his body, perceives nothing external at all, nay not even his inner self. “To think of absorption is already to emerge from absorption.” To die to one’s ownness, to completely annihilate personality, and to let one’s self be lost in the divine essence, is expressly demanded. Nay, even the essential forms of consciousness, space, and time must disappear, as we gather from a conversation of the prophet with Ssaid, where the latter says:—“Day and night have disappeared for me like a flash of lightning; I embraced at once eternity before and after the world; to those in such a state a hundred years and an hour are one and the same.” All this is confirmed by the endeavour after identification with the Absolute, through annihilation of the individual consciousness.
The other equally conceivable way to the enhancement of unity would be the endeavour to let the Absolute perish in the Ego; this way also has been tried by high-soaring minds, but it is so daring, and the goal and the power and means at the command of the individual so disproportionate, that we need take no further account of it.
From mystics proceeded the religious revelations, from mystics philosophy; mysticism is the common souice of both. It is true that fear first created gods on earth, so far as it was fear, which first stirred up the fancy of mystical brains, but what they created was their own, and fear had no part therein. But when the first gods were once there, they propagated among themselves, and fear lost its function. Accordingly the old assertion so highly valued by theologians, of the god-consciousness dwelling in man is no fable, if there be also perfectly godless individuals and peoples, in whom it has never emerged; mysticism is Adam’s scion, and its children are the ideas of the gods and their relation to man. How elevated and pure these ideas may have been even in quite early times in the esoteric doctrines of many peoples, is shown in the case of the Hindus, who have in effect implicitly possessed the whole history of philosophy, presenting in figurative and undeveloped form what we exhibit only too abstractly through only too many writers and volumes.
Thus I see in the whole history of philosophy nothing else than the conversion of a mystically-begotten content from the form of the image or the unproved assertion into that of the rational system, for which certainly often a new mystical production of single parts is required, which a later age finds already contained in the ancient writings.—It is naturally not wonderful, that from the moment when philosophy and religion get to be separated, they both deny their human-mystical origin; the former seeks to present its results as rationally acquired, the latter as external Divine revelation. For as long as the mystic abides by his results, without trying to give them a rational foundation, he is not yet philosopher, and this only becomes possible by his giving conscious reasoning its rights. But this he will not do until he prefers the latter to mysticism, and then he likes to renounce and forget the mystical source of his results, which will not be difficult for him, considering the obscurity of their mode of origin. On the other hand, if the mystic thinks little of conscious reason, or naturally inclines to fanciful exposition, he will seek a pictorial-symbolical expression for his results, which of course can always be only an accidental and imperfect one. Now, as soon as he himself or his successors become incapable of grasping the idea lurking behind the symbols, and take those themselves for the truth, they cease again to be mystics and become religionists. As they themselves can neither mystically reproduce their symbols, nor are these rationally comprehensible, they must appeal to the authority of the founder for the truth of the same, and as human authority appears too small for such important affairs—possibly, too, the founder himself has already claimed to be recipient of divine communications—their truth is referred to the divine authority itself. Thus arise the moulds which shape the dogmatic content of religion. The more adequate are the symbols of the mystical Idea, the purer and sublimer is the religion; the more abstract and philosophical, however, must also the symbols be; the more inadequate and sensuous they are, the more does religion sink into superstitious idolatry and sacerdotal formalism. Now he who takes the symbols of religion again merely as symbols, and wishes to grasp the idea dwelling behind them, steps out of religion as such, which requires, and must require, literal belief in the symbols, and becomes again a mystic; and this is the usual way in which mysticism is formed, by clearer heads finding the historically given religion unsatisfactory, and desiring to grasp the profoundei ideas which lurk behind its symbols. One sees now how closely related religion and mysticism are, and how they are yet somewhat different in principle; one sees also why an established church must always be hostile to mysticism.
If we now ask how it came to pass that mysticism, which brought to men the first revelations of the super-sensible, did not stop there, but became converted into philosophy and religion, the reason of this is shown in the vagueness of the purely mystical result, which must necessarily strive to acquire a form. As little as the mystical is in itself communicable, so little is it comprehensible for the consciousness of the thinker himself; it is like everything unconscious—a definite content to consciousness only when it has entered the forms of sensibility, as light, clearness, vision, image, symbol, or abstract thought. Previousl
y it is only absolutely indefinite feeling, i.e. consciousness experiences nothing but blessedness or unblessedness absolutely. If, now, the feeling first becomes definite in images or thoughts of a certain kind, there dwells in this image or thought alone for consciousness the content of the mystical result; and it is consequently no wonder that, if with the weakening of the mystical energy the inspirations fail, consciousness cleaves to these sensuous residua—least of all, when others do this, to whom only these residua, and not the feelings united therewith, can be imparted, not that undefined somewhat which tells the productive mystic that his images and thoughts are still always an incomplete expression of the super-sensual idea. But communication requires still more: the other party desires to have not merely the What of the mystical results, but also the Why, for the productive mystic receives, it is true, through the way in which he arrives at it, an immediate certainty, but whence is a third person to obtain conviction? Religion helps itself here with the surrogate of authoritative faith annihilating independent judgment; philosophy, however, tries rationally to prove what it has mystically received, and thereby to make the private property of the mystic the public property of thinking humanity. Only too frequently, as could not well be otherwise, considering the difficulty of the subject, these rational proofs are unsuccessful, in that they, apart from what is really incorrect in them, depend again themselves on suppositions, of the truth of which conviction can only be mystically acquired. And thus it comes to pass that the different philosophical systems, however imposing they are to many, yet have only full probative force for the author and for some few who are able to reproduce mystically in themselves the underlying suppositions (e.g., Spinoza’s. Substance, Fichte’s Ego, Schelling’s Subject-Object, Schopenhauer’s Will), and that those philosophical systems, which rejoice in most adherents, are just the poorest of all and most unphilosophical (e.g., Materialism and rationalistic Theism).
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