Josiah Royce in _The World and the Individual_ says that the mystic “gets his reality not by thinking, but by consulting the data of experience. He is trying very skillfully to be a pure empiricist.” “Indeed,” he adds, “I should maintain that the mystics are the only thoroughgoing empiricists in the history of philosophy.”[18] “Finite as we are,” Royce says elsewhere in the same book, “lost though we may seem to be in the woods or in the wide air’s wilderness, in the world of time and chance, we have still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct.”[19] Now the mystics in all ages have insisted that, whether the process be named “instinct,” or “intuition,” or “inner sense,” or “uprushes,” the spirit of man is capable of immediate experience of God. There is something in man, “a soul-center” or “an apex of soul,” which directly apprehends God. It is an immense claim, but those who have the experience are as sure that they have found a wider world of life as is the person who thrills with the appreciation of beauty. Cases of the experience are so well known to us all to-day that I shall quote only a very few accounts. It looks to me as though some of this direct and immediate experience underlay the entire fabric of St. Paul’s transforming and dynamic religious life. “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.” “It is no longer I that live but Christ liveth in me.” “God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying _Abba_, Father.” “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts.” The entire autobiographical story, wherever it comes into light, lets us see a man who is able to face immense tasks and to die daily because he feels in some real way that his life has become “a habitation of God through the Spirit” and that he is being “filled to all fullness with God.” St. Augustine in the same way makes the reader of the _Confessions_ feel that the most wonderful thing about this strange African who was for a thousand years to be the Atlas, on whose shoulders the Church rested, was his experience of God. He is speaking out of experience when he says, “My God is the Life of my life.” “Thou, O God, hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” “I tremble and I burn; I tremble feeling that I am unlike Him; I burn feeling that I am like Him.” “I heard God as the heart heareth.” “We climbed in inner thought and speech, and in wonder of Thy works, until we reached our own minds and passed beyond them and touched That which is not made but is now as it ever shall be, or rather in It is neither ‘hath been’ nor ‘shall be’ but only ‘is’—just for an instant touched It and in one trembling glance arrived at That which is.” Jacob Boehme’s testimony is very familiar, but it is such a good interior account that I must repeat it.