One must be on one’s guard against a multitude of illusions in this connection, and must carefully distinguish between two very different things: religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation. One of the consequences of our profounder knowledge of the nervous system is an increasing contempt for ecstasy and for all of those states of nervous intoxication or even of intellectual intoxication which were formerly regarded by the multitude, and sometimes even by philosophers, as superhuman, and truly divine. Religious ecstasy, so called, may be a phenomenon so purely physical that it suffices to apply a bit of volatile oil of cherry laurel to induce it in certain subjects, and to fill them with ecstatic beatitude, and make them pray and weep and kneel. Such was the fact in the case of a hysteric patient, a hardened courtesan of Jewish origin; it sufficed even to induce in her definite visions, even such as that of the girl with golden hair in the blue robe starred with gold.[69] The intoxication indulged in by the followers of Dionysius in Greece, like that indulged in by hasheesh-eaters, was no more than a violent means of inducing ecstasy and of entering into communication with the supernatural world.[70] In India,[71] and among the Christians, fasting is practised to attain the same end, namely a nervous excitation of the nervous systems. The macerations of the anchorite were, says Wundt, a solitary orgie, in the course of which monks and nuns ardently pressed in their arms fantastic images of the Virgin and the Saviour. According to a legend of Krishnaïsm, the Queen Udayapura, Mira Bai, being pressed to abjure her God, threw herself at the feet of the statue of Krishna and made this prayer: “I have quitted for thee my love, my possessions, my crown; I come to thee, oh, my refuge! Take me.” The statue listened motionless; suddenly it opened and Mira disappeared inside of it. To vanish thus into the bosom of one’s God is—is it not?—the perfect ideal of the highest human religions. All of them have proposed it to man, as a prime object of desire, to die in God; all of them have seen the higher life as a form of ecstasy; whereas the fact is that, in a state of ecstasy, one descends on the contrary to a lower and a vegetative plane of existence, and that this apparent fusion with God is no more than a return to a primitive inertia, to a mineral impassibility, to a statuesque petrifaction. One may believe one’s self uplifted in a state of ecstasy, and mistake for an exaltation of thought what is in reality no more than a sterile nervous excitement. The trouble is that there is no means of measuring the real force and extent of thought. Under normal circumstances the only means that exist are action; one who does not act is inevitably inclined to exaggerate the value of his thought. Amiel himself did not escape from this danger. Fancied superiority disappears the moment a thought seeks expression of whatsoever kind.