denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius _does_ think divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; _he_ is mistaken, I grant, in arrogating inspiration—_him_ I call a mystic.’ But of unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself. BOOK THE THIRD THE MYSTICISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS CHAPTER I. ——a man is not as God, But then most godlike being most a man. TENNYSON. KATE. What a formidable bundle of papers, Henry. ATHERTON. Don’t be alarmed, I shall not read all this to you; only three Neo-Platonist letters I have discovered. MRS. ATHERTON. We were talking just before you came in, Mr. Willoughby, about Mr. Crossley’s sermon yesterday morning. WILLOUGHBY. Ah, the Tabernacle in the Wilderness; did you not think his remarks on the use and abuse of symbolism in general very good? Brief, too, and suggestive; just what such portions of a sermon should be. ATHERTON. He overtook me on my walk this morning, and I alluded to the subject. He said he had been dipping into Philo last week, and that suggested his topic. I told him I had paid that respectable old gentleman a visit or two lately, and we amused ourselves with some of his fancies. Think of the seven branches of the candlestick being the seven planets—the four colours employed, the four elements—the forecourt symbolizing the visible, the two sanctuaries the ideal world—and so on. GOWER. At this rate the furniture in one of Hoffmann’s tales cannot be more alive with spirit than Philo’s temple apparatus. An ingenious trifler, was he not? ATHERTON. Something better, I should say. GOWER. Not, surely, when his great characteristic is an unsurpassed facility for allegorical interpretation. Is not mystical exegesis an invariable symptom of religious dilettantism? ATHERTON. With the successors and imitators—yes; not with the more earnest originals,—such names as Philo, Origen, Swedenborg.