ATHERTON. This, then, is our result. The philosophical perfection of Alexandria and the monastic perfection of Byzantium belong to the same species. Philosophers and monks alike employ the word mysticism and its cognate terms as involving the idea, not merely of initiation into something hidden, but, beyond this, of an internal manifestation of the Divine to the intuition or in the feeling of the secluded soul. It is in this last and narrower sense, therefore, that the word is to be understood when we speak of mystical death, mystical illumination, mystical union with God, and, in fact, throughout the phraseology of what is specially termed _Theologia Mystica_.[8] GOWER. I have often been struck by the surprising variety in the forms of thought and the modes of action in which mysticism has manifested itself among different nations and at different periods. This arises, I should think, from its residing in so central a province of the mind—the feeling. It has been incorporated in theism, atheism, and pantheism. It has given men gods at every step, and it has denied all deity except self. It has appeared in the loftiest speculation and in the grossest idolatry. It has been associated with the wildest licence and with the most pitiless asceticism. It has driven men out into action, it has dissolved them in ecstasy, it has frozen them to torpor. ATHERTON. Hence the difficulty of definition. I have seen none which quite satisfies me. Some include only a particular phase of it, while others so define its province as to stigmatise as mystical every kind of religiousness which rises above the zero of rationalism. WILLOUGHBY. The Germans have two words for mysticism—_mystik_ and _mysticismus_. The former they use in a favourable, the latter in an unfavourable, sense.— GOWER. Just as we say piety and pietism, or rationality and rationalism; keeping the first of each pair for the use, the second for the abuse. A convenience, don’t you think? ATHERTON. If the adjective were distinguishable like the nouns—but it is not; and to have a distinction in the primitive and not in the derivative word is always confusing. But we shall keep to the usage of our own language. I suppose we shall all be agreed in employing the word mysticism in the unfavourable signification, as equivalent generally to _spirituality diseased_, grown unnatural, fantastic, and the like. GOWER. At the same time admitting the true worth of many mystics, and the real good and truth of which such errors are the exaggeration or caricature. ATHERTON. I think we may say thus much generally—that mysticism, whether in religion or philosophy, is that form of error which mistakes for a divine manifestation the operations of a merely human faculty. WILLOUGHBY. There you define, at any rate, the characteristic misconception of the mystics.