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Reality must be rational, they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree 'somehow. Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of the 'dialectic process. Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic, and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality incarnate.
Prayer was the pathway of the old forefathers and prayer in its first inception was a straight road to the center of divine union, but after the minds of men, befogged between the glamour of the external and the power of the internal, evolved a form of prayer that led the race away from its center out into the rim of living, the power ceased; prayer became full of cant and form, words became meaningless and non-mystical; the truth that "God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth" was lost in the increasing bewilderment of the mind.
Of such mysticism William James said "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe ." These mystical states are commonly described as meditation but they include not merely peaceful contemplation but ecstatic rapture.
Pietism and methodism have always inclined toward the gospel Jesus in preference to the Pauline Christ; but their social outlook was far too negative and passive. Democracy must be aggressive, non-mystical, triumphant. It must exalt reason while not forgetting tenderness.
But the fact that hallucinatory pictures can really be seen by a fair percentage of educated Europeans, in water, glass balls, and so forth, is now confirmed by frequent experiment, and accepted by opponents, 'non-mystical writers, like Dr. Parish of Munich.
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