While Art presents this content to the senses, Religion offers it to the conception in the form of a dogma to be held by faith; the deepest Speculative truth is allegorically typified in a historical form, so that it acts upon the mind partly through fantasy and partly through the understanding. Thus Religion presents the same content as Art and Philosophy, but stands between them, and forms a kind of middle ground upon which the purification takes place. “It is the purgatory between the Inferno of Sense and the Paradise of Reason.” Its function is mediation; a continual degrading of the sensuous and external, and an elevation to the supersensual and internal. The transition of Religion into Speculative Philosophy is found in the mystics. Filled with the profound significance of religious symbolism, and seeing in it the explanation of the universe, they essay to communicate their insights. But the form of Science is not yet attained by them. They express themselves, not in those universal categories that the Spirit of the Race has formed in language for its utterance, but they have recourse to symbols more or less inadequate because ambiguous, and of insufficient universality to stand for the archetypes themselves. Thus “Becoming” is the most pure germinal archetype, and belongs therefore to logic, or the system of pure thought, and it has correspondences on concrete planes, as e.g., _time_, _motion_, _life_, _&c._ Now if one of these concrete terms is used for the pure logical category, we have mysticism. The alchemists, as shown by a genial writer of our day, use the technique of their craft to express the profound mysteries of spirit and its regeneration. The Eleusinian and other mysteries do the like. While it is one of the most inspiring things connected with Speculative Philosophy to discover that the “Open Secret of the Universe” has been read by so many, and to see, under various expressions, the same meaning; yet it is the highest problem of Speculative Philosophy to seize a method that is adequate to the expression of the “Secret;” for its (the content’s) own method of genetic development must be the only adequate one. Hence it is that we can classify philosophic systems by their success in seizing the content which is common to Art and Religion, as well as to Philosophy, in such a manner as to allow its free evolution; to have as little in the method that is merely formal, or extraneous to the idea itself. The rigid formalism of Spinoza—though manipulated by a dear speculative spirit—is inadequate to the unfolding of its content; for how could the mathematical method, which is that of quantity or external determinations alone, ever suffice to unfold those first principles which attain to the quantitative only in their result?