II. The morbid exaltation of the religious feeling is derived from attraction and love, as depression springs from fear. Related to joy, and sometimes to megalomania, it is accompanied by partial or total augmentation of both the physical and psychical life. Ecstasy is a transitory and comparatively passive form. Seen from without, it resembles catalepsy in the insensibility to external impressions, and suspension of sensory activity. It differs from it on the motor side. The ecstatic has not the “flexibility of wax” and the complete immobility; he can move, walk, speak, and his face can assume any given expression. Seen from within, ecstasy is an intense state of consciousness, of which the recollection remains after awaking, while catalepsy is attended by unconsciousness, or, at least, complete oblivion. Its psychology is simple enough, if, neglecting details, we confine ourselves to the essential conditions. The confessions of ecstatics, which are tolerably numerous, agree in their principal features: (1) restriction of the area of consciousness, with one intense and overmastering representation serving as the pivot and only centre of association; (2) an emotional state—rapture—a form of love in its highest degree, with desire and the pleasure of possession, which, like profane love, only finds its end in complete fusion and unification (ἐνῶσις of the Alexandrians). The declarations of the great mystics, however involved they may be in metaphor, leave us in no doubt on this point;[202] and their critics, even theologians, have reproached them with frequently being mistaken in the nature of their love. ----- Footnote 202: For further details respecting ecstasy I refer the reader to my _Maladies de la volonté_, ch. v., and to Godfernaux, _Le Sentiment et la Pensée_, p. 49. Purely medical works contain little that is instructive with regard to the psychology of this state; the works of the mystics themselves may be studied with far more profit. -----