philosophers understood this; Aristotle was careful to point out, in an extant fragment, that what was gained in the Mysteries was not instruction but impressions and emotions, and Plato had not hesitated to regard the illumination which came to the initiate in philosophy as of the nature of that acquired in the Mysteries. So it was natural that when Christianity took the place of Paganism the same process went on with only a change in external circumstances. Baptism in the early Church—before it sank to the mere magical sort of rite it later became—was of the nature of initiation into a Mystery, preceded by careful preparation, and the baptised initiate was sometimes crowned with a garland as the initiated were at Eleusis. When we go out of Athens along the beautiful road that leads to the wretched village of Eleusis and linger among the vast and complicated ruins of the chief shrine of mysticism in our Western world, rich in associations that seem to stretch back to the Neolithic Age and suggest a time when the mystery of the blossoming of the soul was one with the mystery of the upspringing of the corn, it may be that our thoughts by no unnatural transition pass from the myth of Demeter and Kore to the remembrance of what we may have heard or know of the manifestations of the spirit among barbarian northerners of other faiths or of no faith in far Britain and America and even of their meetings of so-called “revival.” For it is always the same thing that Man is doing, however various and fantastic the disguises he adopts. And sometimes the revelation of the new life, springing up from within, comes amid the crowd in the feverish atmosphere of artificial shrines, maybe soon to shrivel up, and sometimes the blossoming forth takes place, perhaps more favourably, in the open air and under the light of the sun and amid the flowers, as it were to a happy faun among the hills. But when all disguises have been stripped away, it is always and everywhere the same simple process, a spiritual function which is almost a physiological function, an art which Nature makes. That is all. Footnote 70: It is scarcely necessary to remark that if we choose to give to “mysticism” a definition incompatible with “science,” the opposition cannot be removed. This is, for example, done by Croce, who yet recognises as highly important a process of “conversion” which is nothing else but mysticism as here understood. (See, e.g., Piccoli, _Benedetto Croce_, p. 184.) Only he has left himself no name to apply to it. Footnote 71: “The endeavour of the human mind to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the highest,” which is Pringle Pattison’s widely accepted definition of mysticism, I prefer not to use because it is ambiguous. The “endeavour,” while it indicates that we are concerned with an art, also suggests its strained pathological forms, while “actual communion” lends itself to ontological interpretations. Footnote 72: