No doubt you know all about it from books, and you may prefer the wording of that tentative approach made by the most spiritually-minded of modern philosophers to a definition of God--"Something that is in and about me, in the consciousness of which I am free from fear and desire--something which would make it easy to do the most (otherwise) difficult thing without any other motive except that it was the one thing worth doing." And William James has, of course, shown more skill in explaining what mystic ecstasy is and what is its place in religion, and what its relations to such mirages of itself as the mock inspirations of Antony's lust and Burns' drunkenness. And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit and marshal. With tongues unwontedly loosened men would set to and dig out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks are made with which religions are built. One man, with infinite exertions of disentanglement, would struggle up to some expression of the fugitive trance of realization into which he had found he could throw himself by letting his mind go, for all it was worth, on the thought of his own self, his "I-ness" until for some few seconds of poised exaltation he had thought self clean away and was free. "It first came by a fluke when I was a kiddy. If I'd lie in my cot, very still, and look hard a long time at the candle, and think very hard--'I,' 'I,' 'I,' what's 'I?' I could work myself up to that state I'd be right outside o' myself, and seeing the queer little body I'd been, with my thought about 'I' doing this and 'I' getting that, and the way that I'd thought it was natural I should, and no such a thing as any 'I' there all the time, or only one to the whole set of us. Hard I'd try, every time, to hold the thing on. Seemed as if there was no end to what I might get to know if I could make it last out, that sort of rum start. But the thing went to bits every time, next moment after I'd got it worked up, and there I'd be left on the mat like, and thinking 'Gosh! what a pitch I got up to that time!' and how I'd screw it up higher, next go."