Such trances have been of common occurrence in the religious life of the world, as Professor James has shown so exhaustively in his great book, "Varieties of Religious Experience." And in that book, too, it is maintained, against the scientific conclusions, that such ecstasies "signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporal one of degeneration and hysteria," that mystical states have an actual value as revelations of the truth. After passing in review many examples of ecstasy and trance, from the occasional experiences of the poets to the constant experiences of the mediæval mystics and the Hindu Yogis, he finally comes to the interesting conclusion that: "This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our one-ness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity--which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land." The witness given religion in Tennyson's mystical trances is then his most valuable contribution to the speculative thought of the century, and in a sense is prophetic of the twentieth century, because in this century revelations attained in this way have been given a credence long denied them except in the case of the uneducated and super-emotional, by a man of the sound scholarship and good judgment of Professor James.