At this point the critical reader will certainly offer an objection. “You have been inviting me,” he will say, “to do nothing more or less than trust my senses: and this too on the authority of those impracticable dreamers the poets. Now it is notorious that our senses deceive us. Every one knows that; and even your own remarks have already suggested it.

How then, can a wholesale and uncritical acceptance of my sensations help me to unite with Reality?

Many of these sensations we share with the animals: in some, the animals obviously surpass us. Will you suggest that my terrier, smelling his way through an uncoordinated universe, is a better mystic than I?” To this I reply, that the terrier’s contacts with the world are doubtless crude and imperfect; yet he has indeed preserved a directness of apprehension which you have lost. He gets, and responds to, the real smell; not a notion or a name.

Certainly the senses, when taken at face-value, do deceive us: yet the deception resides not so much in them, as in that conceptual world which we insist on building up from their reports, and for which we make them responsible.

They deceive us less when we receive these reports uncooked and unclassified, as simple and direct experiences. Then behind the special and imperfect stammerings which we call colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, we sometimes discern a whole fact—at once divinely simple and infinitely various—from which these partial messages proceed; and which seeks as it were to utter itself in them. And we feel, when this is so, that the fact thus glimpsed is of an immense significance; imparting to that aspect of the world which we are able to perceive all the significance, all the character which it possesses.

The more of the artist there is in us, the more intense that significance, that character will seem: the more complete, too, will be our conviction that our uneasiness, the vagueness of our reactions to things, would be cured could we reach and unite with the fact, instead of our notion of it. And it is just such an act of union, reached through the clarified channels of sense and unadulterated by the content of thought, which the great artist or poet achieves. We seem in these words to have come far from the mystic, and that contemplative consciousness wherewith he ascends to the contact of Truth.

As a matter of fact, we are merely considering that consciousness in its most natural and accessible form: for contemplation is, on the one hand, the essential activity of all artists; on the other, the art through which those who choose to learn and practise it may share in some fragmentary degree, according to their measure, the special experience of the mystic and the poet. By it they may achieve that virginal outlook upon things, that celestial power of communion with veritable life, which comes when that which we call “sensation” is freed from the tyranny of that which we call “thought.”

The artist is no more and no less than a contemplative who has learned to express himself, and who tells his love in colour, speech, or sound: the mystic, upon one side of his nature, is an artist of a special and exalted kind, who tries to express something of the revelation he has received, mediates between Reality and the race.

In the game of give and take which goes on between the human consciousness and the external world, both have learned to put the emphasis upon the message from without, rather than on their own reaction to and rearrangement of it. Both have exchanged the false imagination which draws the sensations and intuitions of the self into its own narrow circle, and there distorts and transforms them, for the true imagination which pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-giving, towards the greater universe.

Life is not merely a matter of physical vigor, or of health, or of the capacity to enjoy oneself. What is life? It is something far more than the breath in our nostrils, the blood beating in our wrists, the response to physical stimulation. True all these things are essential for a fully human life, but they do not themselves constitute that life in all its fullness. (7).

The mark of true life in man is therefore not turbulence but control, not effervescence but lucidity and direction, not passion but the sobriety that sublimates all passion and elevates it to the clear inebriation of mysticism. (8).

Man, then, can only fully be said to be alive when he becomes plainly conscious of the real meaning of his own existence, that is to say when he experiences something of the fullness of intelligence, freedom and spirituality that are actualized within himself. (9).

Man is fully alive only when he experiences, at least to some extent, that he is really spontaneously dedicating himself, in all truth, to the real purpose of his own personal existence. In other words, man is alive not only when he exists, not only when he exists and acts, not only when he exists and acts as a man (that is to say freely), but above all when he is conscious of the reality and inviolability of his own freedom, and aware at the same time of his capacity to consecrate that freedom entirely to the purpose for which it was given him.

And this realization does not come into being until his freedom is actually devoted to its right purpose. Man “finds himself” and is happy, when he is able to be aware that his freedom is spontaneously and vigorously functioning to orientate his whole being toward the purpose which it craves, in its deepest spiritual center, to achieve.

This purpose is life in the fullest sense of the word—not mere individual, self centered, egotistical life which is doomed to end in death, but a life that transcends individual limitations and needs, and subsists outside the individual self in the Absolute—in Christ, in God. (11).