Vital lies Author:Vernon Lee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE TRUTHS OF MYSTICISM I DO not feel sure who had put that marker into the " Varieties of Religious Experience," and it is of little consequence... more » whether it was myself or my Pragmatist, or, indeed, whether such a Pragmatist ever existed outside my fancy. Suffice it that the slip was inserted at page 413, and that on it was written " Professor James's examination of the message of mysticism from the point of view of " true-in-so-far- forth." The examination in question, which I should like to analyse from the point of view of true-without any so-far-forth, begins with the following remarks :— " To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggestion and . . . hypnotic states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce." 91 The value for knowledge, writes Professor James. And so far as knowledge is concerned, I agree with him : a pathological condition may or might be such as to favour the acquisition of certain sorts of facts, or the analysis of certain others, or the recognition, let us say the divination, of certain relations, of what we call laws. The question depends upon what meaning we attach to the word pathological. It is quite conceivable that the hyperacuity of a given faculty may coincide with a bad complexion of body, or even, by defrauding more ordinary functions, lead to bodily deterioration and death ; and may we go so far as to imagine (psychiatry of the Lombroso-Mobius, etc., kind has surely developed our imagination in such matters !) that hyperacuity of a given sort may produce some par...« less