With most of us, beyond these more or less universal experiences, the times of illumination are intermittent, fluctuating, imperfectly accountable, and uncontrollable. The "artist" lives to a greater or less degree in a perpetual state of illumination, in perpetual communication with his larger self. But he remains within the universe constructed for him by his senses, whose rhythm he never fully transcends. His thoughts are those which the veil of sense calls into being, and though that veil for him is woven far thinner above the mystery of life than it is for most of us, it is there. Imprisoned in beauty, he is content to dwell, reporting to his fellows the glory that he sees. The religious genius, as represented pre-eminently by the great mystics--those in whom the sense of an ultimate and essential goodness, beauty, and truth, is the dominant characteristic--have consciously bent all their energies to breaking through the veil of sense, to making a journey to the heart of reality, to winning the freedom of the very citadel of Life itself. Their method has invariably included what--again borrowing from psychology--we must call the deliberate control of all external stimuli, a swimming, so to say, against the whole tide of the surface intelligence, and this in no negative sense, no mere sinking into a state of undifferentiated consciousness, but rather, as we have seen with Fox, a setting forth to seek something already found--something whose presence is in some way independent of the normal thinking and acting creature, something which has already proclaimed itself in moments of heightened consciousness--in the case of the religious temperament at "conversion." Silence, bodily and mental, is necessarily the first step in this direction. There is no other way of entering upon the difficult enterprise of transcending the rhythms of sense, and this, and nothing else, has been invariably the first step taken by the mystic upon his pilgrimage. Skirting chasms of metaphor, abysses of negation and fear, he has held along this narrowest of narrow ways. But the early Quakers and the old-time mystics knew nothing of scientific psychology. They arrived "naturally" at their method of seeking in silence what modern thought is calling "the intuitive principle of action"--"the independent spiritual life fulfilling itself within humanity"--"the unformulated motive which is the greater part of mind." Like every seeker, on whatever level, they were led by feeling. Feeling passed into action. Thought followed in due course, and was deposited as doctrine. They spoke, groping for symbols, of "the seed," "the light," "the true birth." In other words--lest we go too far with psychology's trinity of thought, feeling, and will as separable activities "doing the will"--they "knew the doctrine."