The answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish as the return of Ulysses was. The secret is kept in book after book. One can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and challenge one another, like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth. For the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is usually included under psychical phenomena, that is, the phenomena of dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric and occult phenomena. Thirty years ago Professor Royce said: “In the Father’s house are many mansions, and their furniture is extremely manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing, communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the supremacy of the spiritual world.” These phenomena are worthy of careful painstaking study and attention, for they will eventually throw much light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact already throwing much light upon it. But they furnish us slender data for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its religious and spiritual bearing. We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines which fill a large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. These doctrines had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially the same form if the exponents of them had not been mystics. Mystical experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard the experience, as they also often do in the case of religious _faith_ in general. Mystical experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert writers call “the mystic way.” There are as many mystical “ways” as there are gates to the New Jerusalem: “On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” One might as well try to describe _the way_ of making love, or _the way_ of appreciating the grand canyon as to describe _the way_ to the discovery of God, as though there were only one way.