Even when Coleridge is most ‘the God-intoxicated man’ his remarks to a careful reader suggest that if they could be decoded, as it were, they would provide at the least a basis for interesting speculation. Many adumbrations of this mystical view might be quoted. “There is a communication between mystery and mystery, between the unknown soul and the unknown reality; at one particular point in the texture of life the hidden truth seems to break through the veil”, writes Mr Middleton Murry in an Essay[94] which as an emotive utterance disguised to resemble an argument is of interest. How this feeling of insight arises we have seen in the foregoing chapter; the sense of immediate revelation of which he treats as “the primary stuff out of which literature is created” is certainly characteristic of the greater kinds of art. And there must be few who have not by one arrangement or another contrived from these visionary moments a philosophy which, for a time, has seemed to them unshakable because for a time emotionally satisfying. But emotional satisfaction gained at the cost of intellectual bondage is unstable. When it does not induce a partial stupor it breaks down. The freely inquiring mind has a fatal way of overthrowing all immediate and mystical intuitions which, instead of being duly subordinate, insist on giving it orders. For the inquiring mind is simply the human being’s way of finding a place and function for all its experiences and activities, a place and function compatible with the rest of its experience. When the mystical insight is understood, and its claims fitly directed, although it may seem to those who still misunderstand it to have lost all the attributes for which they have sought to retain it, and to be no longer either mystical or an insight, it does not lose but gains in value. But this further adjustment is often very difficult to make. These Revelation Doctrines, when we know what they are really about, come nearer, we shall see, to supplying an explanation of the value of the arts than any of the other traditional accounts. But the process of translation is no easy matter. They are not what they seem, these utterances apparently about Truth. In interpreting them we shall find ourselves forced to consider language from an angle and with a closeness which are not usual, and to do so, certain very powerful resistances and deeply ingrained habits of the mind have first to be broken down. [85] _Shooting Niagara_. [86] _Sartor Resartus_. [87] _Essay on Style_.