An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added, however, as I have already said, that mystical experience is not confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological. The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of _value_.
We come at length to the central question of our consideration: Do mystical experiences settle anything? Are they purely subjective and one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be two-sided? Do they take the experiencer across the chasm that separates “self” from “Other”? Mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it had objective reference. It comes to the individual with indubitable authority. He is certain that he has found some thing other than himself. He has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with reality beyond the margins of his personal self. “A tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed,” as William James once put it.
We do not get very far when we undertake to reduce knowledge to an affair of sense-experience. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” can be said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by Brahma. There are many forms of human experience in which the data of the senses are so vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any real explanation of what occurs in consciousness. This is true of all our experiences of _value_, which apparently spring out of synthetic or synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is unified and creative. The vibrations of ether which bombard the rods and cones of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of beauty in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not the _cause_ of it. The concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sense _causes_ this consciousness of moral obligation. The famous answer of Leibnitz to the crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent. To the phrase: “There is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” Leibnitz added, “except the mind itself.” That means that the creative activity of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can not be ignored in any of the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. It will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato called the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss intelligently the “findings” of the mystic.