=Realism, Mysticism, and Idealism.= It will not be amiss at this point to contrast three of the great types of human thought,――Realism and Mysticism with the Idealism of which Hegel was the consummate expression. The Idealistic Period of European thought is confined within the forty-one years between 1790 and 1831. Moreover it is a world-wide movement, the philosophical expression of which is restricted to the German people. Mysticism and Realism represent the civilizations of longer periods and of many peoples. Mysticism is, for example, the attitude of mind frequently found in the Middle Ages in Europe, and may be roughly said to be the philosophy of the Oriental peoples. Spinoza was a belated mystic and its best European exponent; and against the revival of Spinoza’s Mysticism during this period Hegel as an idealist took his stand. Realism has been a popular philosophy in all civilizations at all times, and it was the irony of fate that Realism followed directly upon Hegel’s long period of dominance as an idealist. Modern science is based on Realism, and so, on the whole, was Greek civilization. In contrast to Realism, Idealism represents a few years of history and has been confined to a limited civilization, yet for profundity of insight into the meaning of life Idealism is the consummation of human reflection. Since “philosophy lends itself to extended discourse,” it is quite impossible to contrast these theories briefly in more than a crude way. From the mystic’s point of view, absolute reality is that which can be immediately apprehended. However, since immediate intuition is always undetermined, the mystic’s reality is a very vague and abstract thing, although for him it is none the less real. Such a reality is not usually sought in the “world of nature”; for nature objects are very definite, besides being very transitory. The mystic’s world of reality is within; therefore God to the mystic is to be found within the soul and is to be contrasted with the unreality of the world of sense. There is only one reality, and that is within the soul; all else is an illusion. Reality is gained by direct knowledge and never by the process of logical reflection. Mysticism is frequently allied with æsthetics; the love of God is apparently the same as the love for a work of art; the immediate intuition that the soul has of God apparently is the same psychological process as the artistic ecstasy over a thing of beauty. Both result in the absorption of the soul in its object, and in the presence of either all else seems illusory. Now Realism is a theory that is more easily defined than Mysticism. It is simply the conception of many realities independent of one another and of the thinking mind. Reality is not one, it is a plurality of independent things, all of which are independent of the thinking process. Such realities are not undefined. As in Idealism, our knowledge of them is a definite matter of reflection; but against