Now we come to the next group of essentials: the necessary acts and dispositions of the mystic himself, the development which takes place in him—the psychological facts, that is to say, which are represented by the so-called “mystic way.” The mystic way is best understood as a process of sublimation, which carries the correspondences of the self with the Universe up to higher levels than those on which our normal consciousness works. Just as the normal consciousness stands over against the unconscious, which, with its buried impulses and its primitive and infantile cravings, represents a cruder reaction of the organism to the external world; so does the developed mystical life stand over against normal consciousness, with its preoccupations and its web of illusions encouraging the animal will-to-dominate and animal will-to-live. Normal consciousness sorts out some elements from the mass of experiences beating at our doors and constructs from them a certain order; but this order lacks any deep meaning or true cohesion, because normal consciousness is incapable of apprehending the underlying reality from which these scattered experiences proceed. The claim of the mystical consciousness is to a closer reading of truth; to an apprehension of the divine unifying principle behind appearance. “The One,” says Plotinus, “is present everywhere and absent only from those unable to perceive it”; and when we _do_ perceive it we “have another life ... attaining the aim of our existence, and our rest.” To know this at first hand—not to guess, believe or accept, but to be certain—is the highest achievement of human consciousness, and the ultimate object of mysticism. How is it done? There are two ways of attacking this problem which may conceivably help us. The first consists in a comparison of the declarations of different mystics, and a sorting out of those elements which they have in common: a careful watch being kept, of course, for the results of conscious or unconscious imitation, of tradition and of theological preconceptions. In this way we get some first-hand evidence of factors which are at any rate usually present, and may possibly be essential. The second line of enquiry consists in a re-translation into psychological terms of these mystical declarations; when many will reveal the relation in which they stand to the psychic life of man.