“The science of the Sufis,” says a Persian philosopher of the eleventh century, {151b} “aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature?—what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s hand.” It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the same characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions of Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mind is one of expectant wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills the entire being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this exaltation, this revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to sensation. It can be felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual formulæ. It can never be reduced to logical shape. And the reference to “touch” in the quotation just made will remind the reader of the important part played by the tactile sense in Jefferies’ æsthetic appreciations. We are not concerned here with any of the philosophical speculations involved in these “trance conditions.” All that concerns us is the remarkable literature that has resulted from this well-ascertained psychical condition. How far the condition is the outcome of forces beyond our immediate ken which compel recognition from certain imaginative minds, how far it is a question of physical disturbance; or, in other words, how far these visions are objective realities, how far subjective, are questions that he beyond the scope of the present paper. One thing, however, is indisputable; they have exercised a great fascination over men of sensitive, nervous temperaments, and are often remarkable for the wider significance they have given to our ideals of beauty. The fact that mysticism may arise out of morbid conditions of health does not justify us, I think, in looking upon it with Max Nordau as “the fruit of a degenerate brain.” Such a criticism is at one with the linking of genius with insanity—an argument already broached in the paper dealing with Hazlitt.