Tennyson has given many accounts both in prose and poetry of similar affirmation experiences, sometimes initiated from within and sometimes from without. This account from the _Memoirs_ is a good specimen: “I have frequently had a kind of waking trance—this for the lack of a better word—quite up from my boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death was almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.” Like the æsthetic experience, again, the mystical experience brings an extraordinary integration, or unifying, of the self, a flooding of the entire being with joy and an expansion which, as in the case of the highest æsthetic experiences, takes the soul out into a world which “never was on sea or land,” and which, nevertheless, for the moment seems the only world. Balfour has finely pointed out in his _Theism and Humanism_, that this expansion and joy and infinite aspect which are inherent in the æsthetic values cannot be rationally explained except on the supposition that these values are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the world—the experience must have a pedigree adequate to account for its greatness. We cannot begin with an experience which gives an absolutely new dimension of life and a new world of joy, and then end in our explanation with a phenomenal play of cosmic atoms—“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”