Conduct of life; English essays -- 20th century; Ethics; Philosophy
RELIGION is a large word, of good import and of evil import, and with
the general discussion of religion we are not in this place concerned.
Its quintessential core—which is the art of finding our emotional
relationship to the world conceived as a whole—is all that here matters,
and it is best termed “Mysticism.” No doubt it needs some courage to use
that word. It is the common label of abuse applied to every
pseudo-spiritual thing that is held up for contempt. Yet it would be
foolish to allow ourselves to be deflected from the right use of a word
by the accident of its abuse. “Mysticism,” however often misused, will
here be used, because it is the correct term for the relationship of the
Self to the Not-Self, of the individual to a Whole, when, going beyond
his own personal ends, he discovers his adjustment to larger ends, in
harmony or devotion or love.
It has become a commonplace among the unthinking, or those who think
badly, to assume an opposition of hostility between mysticism and
science.[70] If “science” is, as we have some reason to believe, an art,
if “mysticism” also is an art, the opposition can scarcely be radical
since they must both spring from the same root in natural human
activity.
II
IF, indeed, by “science” we mean the organisation of an intellectual
relationship to the world we live in adequate to give us some degree of
power over that world, and if by “mysticism” we mean the joyful
organisation of an emotional relationship to the world conceived as a
whole,[71] the opposition which we usually assume to exist between them
is of comparatively modern origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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