remained, however, thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and Mediaeval high esteem for the Mystical element of religion;--“right prayer is a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it.” And, more moderately: “We have no desire to penetrate through Christ on to God: for we consider that in God Himself we still find nothing but Christ.”[312] (2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most understandable, indeed respectable, reaction against all empty, sentimental Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the essential importance of the Concrete and Historical. And, in particular, the insistence upon the supreme value and irreplaceable character and function of Christ is profoundly true.--Yet three counter-considerations have ever to be borne in mind. (i) It remains certain that we do not know, or experience anything, to which we can attribute any fuller reality, which is either purely objective or purely subjective; and that there exists no process of knowing or experiencing such a reality which would exclude either the objective or the subjective factor. “Whatever claims to be fully real,” either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object, “must be an individual … an organic whole, which has its principle of unity in itself.” The truly real, then, is a thing that has an inside; and the sharp antithesis drawn, although in contrary directions, by Aristotle and by Kant, between the Phenomenal and the Intelligible worlds, does not exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of our apprehended fellow-men, or God.[313]--But Hermann is so haunted by the bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within us being necessarily useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the right apprehension of the object thus responded to, that he is driven to follow the will-o’-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely exclusive objectivity. (ii) Bent on this will-o’-the-wisp quest of an exclusive objectivity, he has to define all Mysticism in terms of Exclusive Mysticism, and then to reject such an aberration. “Wherever the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an interior experience of the individual soul, in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed directly to reveal the true nature of this experience, _viz._ in a state of possession by God, and this without anything exterior being apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without the positive content of some mental contemplation setting thoughts in motion and raising the spiritual level of the soul’s life; _there_ is Mystical Piety.”[314]