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The Art of Life Series 
 
The Sixth Sense 
 
THE ART OF LIFE SERIES 
 Edward Howard Griggs, Editor 
 
 The Sixth Sense 
 
 ITS CULTIVATION AND USE 
 
 BY 
 CHARLES H. BRENT 
 
 AUTHOR OF " WITH GOD IN THE WORLD," 
 "LEADERSHIP," " WITH GOD IN PRAYER," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W- HUEBSCH 
 
 191 1 
 
*4 
 
 Copyright, 1911 
 By B. W. HUEBSCH 
 
 PRINTED IN U. S. A. 
 
 ft I) 
 
 ©CI.A303668 
 
TO 
 
 R. C. AND E. M. D., 
 
 DEAR FRIENDS 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 This book was planned and promised to 
 the publisher more than three years ago. 
 Exacting duties have compelled the writer 
 from time to time to defer the completion 
 of his undertaking. The delay has been 
 profitable in that it has afforded opportunity 
 for the study of recent works on kindred 
 topics, which in some respects has modified 
 and in some enlarged the original concep- 
 tion of the subject in hand. A long ocean 
 voyage at last has provided the quiet in 
 which to write out these thoughts* 
 
 SS. Prinz Eitel Friedrick, 
 Gulf of Aden, 
 8 January, 191 l a 
 
CHAPTER 
 
 Introductory Note .... 
 
 PAGE 
 
 • 9 
 
 I 
 
 The Sixth Sense . . 
 
 • 13 
 
 II 
 
 In Relation to Health . . 
 
 • 35 
 
 III 
 
 In Relation to Thought . 
 
 . 52 
 
 IV 
 
 In Relation to Character 
 
 . 69 
 
 V 
 
 In Relation to Religion . . 
 
 . 86 
 
The Sixth Sense 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE SIXTH SENSE 
 
 By the Sixth Sense I mean the Mystic 
 Sense, or that inner perceptive faculty 
 which distinguishes man from the highest 
 below him and allies him to the highest 
 above him. So distinctive among created 
 objects is it of man that it might, not in- 
 aptly, be characterized as the Human 
 Sense. It is used for no one exclusive 
 purpose; on the contrary it is only under 
 its operation that man's activities, one and 
 all, become human. In its nature it dif- 
 fers essentially from the bodily senses 
 though we are justified in thinking of :t as 
 a sense because its function is, like them, to 
 perceive and to afford food for thought. 
 
 The five bodily senses originally, in the 
 first stages of evolution, were, and, in their 
 ultimate aspect are, one sense — the 
 
 13 
 
(14 The Sixth Sense 
 
 sense of touch. By means of it plant, 
 mollusc and worm relate themselves to 
 the universe of which they are a part. 
 By degrees the single sense, in the evolu- 
 tionary process, finds: opportunity and oc- 
 casion for specialization. Sight is ex- 
 traordinarily sensitized touch by means of 
 which form and color* are perceived, and 
 the distant object comes bowing to our 
 feet; the stars, leaping across space, are 
 converted into intimate friends, and 
 earth's farthest horizon lies at our door. 
 Hearing is touch localized and special- 
 ized so as to be capable of perceiving the 
 vibrations caused by the impact of one 
 body upon another; its enlarged capacity 
 classifies sound in such a way as to offer 
 its mutations and subtleties for our use 
 and pleasure as the weaver offers his 
 threads to the loom. Smell is that spe- 
 cialization of touch, uniquely delicate, sup- 
 posed by Maeterlinck to be still in its ear- 
 lier stage of development in human kind, 
 which responds to the stimulus of those 
 otherwise intangible exhalations called 
 odor. Lastly, taste is touch specialized so 
 as to discern the inner properties of food 
 stuff; taste is the testing sense. Mere 
 touch determines the existence, specialized 
 
The Sixth Sense 15 
 
 touch the character and niceties of matter 
 or the physical universe. 
 
 As indicative of the unity of the animal 
 senses and the cooperative sympathy be- 
 tween them, it is noteworthy that when one 
 sense is impaired or destroyed, the others 
 diligently endeavor to supply its absence, 
 the entire body playing the part as far as 
 possible of eye or ear or both, and each 
 remaining sense growing extraordinarily 
 acute so as to take on somewhat of the 
 character of the most nearly affiliated or 
 the neighbor sense. The blind man can 
 almost see with ears and hands, the deaf 
 can almost hear with eyes. The senses 
 that are left strain, not without a measure 
 of success, to convey to the brain impres- 
 sions for which they are not congenitally 
 adapted. 
 
 The organic differences in the bodily 
 senses, then, find a close unity in functional 
 similarity, all the sensory nerves grouping 
 themselves under the head of touch. The 
 Mystic Sense, likewise, first comes to our 
 attention as a simple faculty of percep- 
 tion by which we gain cognition of that 
 department of reality that transcends bod- 
 ily touch and its subdivisions, but study 
 reveals that its unity is ordered complexity, 
 
16 The Sixth Sense 
 
 as in the case of all developed endow- 
 ments. Broadly speaking it is the sense 
 which relates man to the spiritual or psy- 
 chic aspect of reality. It puts us into re- 
 lation with the spiritual order of which 
 we are a part. It finds room for exer- 
 cise, gains its freedom, and reaches its 
 highest development in this sphere, be- 
 ginning operations at the point where the 
 bodily senses are compelled by inherent 
 limitations to halt. It discerns the inner- 
 most character, use, value of the objective, 
 and differentiates between the human and 
 the animal estimate of things. Indeed it 
 has in it that which is not of this world or 
 order. It soars beyond human and mun- 
 dane affairs and steeps its wings in Divine 
 altitudes where the throne of God is set. 
 Not only does it perceive but it also lays 
 hold of and appropriates that phase of re- 
 ality which lies beyond the unaided reach, 
 or eludes the grasp, of all the rest of our 
 faculties in their happiest combination, and 
 therefore of any one of them independently. 
 It takes the material gathered by physical 
 contact with the world of sight and sound, 
 and presents it to the mind for rationaliz- 
 ing operations. More than that, it comes 
 back freighted with wealth gathered in 
 
The Sixth Sense 17 
 
 explorations in regions where neither body 
 nor reason can tread, converting life's dull 
 prose into poetry and song. 
 
 The most alert and indispensable of en- 
 dowments, it is at once sociable with the 
 remainder of man's faculties, external and 
 internal, and jealously independent of 
 them saving of human consciousness alone. 
 In its higher stages of development it ac- 
 cepts suggestions from all, dictation from 
 none. Its manner is courteous and its 
 mode of approach one of promptings and 
 hints. The sphere of every other faculty 
 is its sphere where it is content to play the 
 modest part of a handmaiden, never usurp- 
 ing functions already provided for, al- 
 though it has a sphere of its own whither 
 not even reason can follow. It is supple- 
 mentary to all, contradictory to none. 
 Without its exercise there can be no prog- 
 ress or growth. It has its origin in a 
 groping instinct, its final development in 
 orderly activities capable of increasingly 
 clear classification. Body, intellect, char- 
 acter, moral and religious, are under its 
 influence and dependent upon its beneficent 
 operations. It plays upon the body, con- 
 tributing to its health and efficiency; it gives 
 ;wings to the intellect, making it creative 
 
1 8. The Sixth Sense 
 
 and productive, capable of formulating 
 hypotheses and venturing upon speculation ; 
 it converts the seemingly impossible into 
 the normal, bringing moral ideals within 
 reach of the will, without which improve- 
 ment in character would be a matter of 
 chance; it unfolds the Divine to the hu- 
 man and forms a nexus between here and 
 beyond, now and to-morrow, finite and in- 
 finite, God and man. It looks not only 
 up but down, making the nature outside 
 of us intelligible to the nature inside of us 
 and friendly with it. If it peoples the 
 stars, it also makes a universe of the atom. 
 It is mysterious, recollective, emotional, in- 
 tuitive, speculative, imaginative, prophetic, 
 minatory, expectant, penetrative. As it 
 moves up or down with equal freedom, so 
 it reaches backward or forward, is at- 
 tached or detached at will, in its opera- 
 tions. 
 
 The Sixth Sense, or, to be more accurate, 
 the second group of senses, has its special- 
 ized functions, difficult as it is to analyze 
 with accuracy this most spiritual endow- 
 ment of human personality, the inner gift 
 of touch. It has specializations parallel 
 to those of the bodily senses. Sight, hear- 
 ing and testing are its functions. So clear 
 
The Sixth Sense 19 
 
 eyed is it that it can see with the nicety of 
 an eye aided by the microscope, so sensitive 
 to voices that the lowest whispers impart 
 a message, so critical as to test values with 
 a precision and swiftness that surpass the 
 taste and smell which tell us what is sweet 
 and what unsavory. 
 
 If it be argued that I am but dilating 
 on certain aspects of mind, I am not con- 
 cerned to deny that all may be compre- 
 hended under that convenient blanket-word. 
 But they are as distinct from the rational- 
 izing media as from the will. 
 
 The nearest approach to a satisfactory 
 substitute for the term " mystic sense " in 
 terms of the reason is " conceptual rea- 
 son." It furnishes us with the thought of 
 a faculty which has procreative or genera- 
 tive properties capable of being fertilized 
 by intercourse with that which is separate 
 from and higher than itself. Its first ac- 
 tivity is to lay itself over against that 
 which, though partaking of its own na- 
 ture, is not itself. It is not self-fertilizing 
 and can conceive or beget only after hav- 
 ing perceived and apprehended. 1 It has 
 
 1 It is only partially true to say that concept follows 
 upon percept. Their action is simultaneous more 
 nearly than consecutive. Conceptualism as a com- 
 plete system cannot perhaps stand but in its origin it 
 
20 The Sixth Sense 
 
 constant regard for an objective and com- 
 munication with it. 
 
 The operation of the Mystic Sense is 
 summed up in the single word faith, 
 which is described as the giving substafltST 
 to that which is hoped for, the testing of 
 things not seen. 1 There is no objection to 
 letting the word faith cover the whole 
 working of the Mystic Sense, provided it 
 is not restricted to a severely religious 
 meaning. It is thus that it is commonly 
 understood, or at any rate when applied in 
 other connections it is assumed to be the 
 working of a different faculty from that 
 exercised in the sphere of religion. In its 
 distinctively religious meaning, faith is the 
 operation of the Mystic Sense in its highest 
 employment. There is no one faculty that 
 is reserved exclusively for religious em- 
 ployment. The fact is that religious faith 
 is no more separate from the processes of 
 the Mystic Sense which appropriate health 
 for the body, hypotheses for the mind, 
 working principles for the man of action, 
 and ideals for the character, or independent 
 of them, than the act of physical percep- 
 
 was a healthy reaction against both nominalism and 
 realism, as well as a mediator combining the good in 
 both. 
 iHeb. xi:x. 
 
The Sixth Sense 21 
 
 tion, which enables us to touch the stars, is 
 separate from that use of the sensory 
 nerves which relates us to the book we 
 handle, or independent of it. They are 
 both the result of a single faculty, or group 
 of faculties, operating in different altitudes. 
 Faith will be accepted in these pages as a 
 philosophic term. Thus we speak of 
 scientific faith, moral faith, and religious 
 faith with equal appropriateness, meaning 
 the Mystic Sense operating respectively in 
 the interests of the scientific, of the moral, 
 and of the religious. 
 
 The Mystic Sense has for its workshop 
 the uplands of life in the rarefied atmos- 
 phere of ideas and ideals. It is at once a 
 super-sense giving us a bird's-eye view of 
 the universe which is not permitted at close 
 quarters, and a sub-sense bringing before 
 our attention the contents hidden beneath 
 the surface of things. There are not two 
 worlds, objective and subjective respec- 
 tively, but two aspects of one world — 
 things as they are in their absolute and ul- 
 timate being, and things as they are rela- 
 tively or as apprehended by our cognitive 
 powers. Our conception of the truth is a 
 distortion or falls short of the truth, and it 
 is our aspiration to bring about such a co- 
 
22 The Sixth Sense 
 
 incidence as will make the relation of sub- 
 ject to object perfect. We draw the thing 
 as we see it for the God of things as they 
 are now, not to-morrow only, the sole dif- 
 ference being that to-morrow our painting 
 will be truer to the original and conse- 
 quently more artistic than now. All ob- 
 jective is immediately reduced by man, by 
 subconscious or conscious process, into sub- 
 jective, so that we may for the sake of con- 
 venience talk of subjective and objective 
 phases of reality, the subjective being hu- 
 man, partial, progressive, the objective be- 
 ing divine, absolute, and final. 
 
 There is an objective physical world and 
 an objective psychic or spiritual world, 
 the latter being immanent in the former, 
 though not limited by it, so that every ma- 
 terial object has spiritual contents. The 
 spiritual is no more an inside without an 
 outside than the physical is an outside with- 
 out an inside. Each has its phase of re- 
 ality, though in the ultimate analysis the 
 physical is dependent for its value upon its 
 spiritual capacity. The physical has a 
 non-sensible inside which to be discerned 
 calls for distinctively human as distin- 
 guished from mere animal powers of per- 
 ception. Dimly in animal life there is a 
 
The Sixth Sense 23 
 
 recognition of inner character in objects — 
 hostility, affinity, nourishment and the like 
 are instinctively sensed ; but here deep per- 
 ception stops except where, by reason of 
 what is called domestication or association 
 with man, certain human characteristics are 
 faintly imaged in dog or horse. 
 
 There is no antagonism between the 
 physical and the spiritual. The physical 
 world is to man a medium through which 
 phases of the spiritual are reached. The 
 only antagonism there can be is that which 
 arises by an attempt to use the material 
 without regard for its full spiritual contents 
 or inside. Were not the physical universe 
 a sacrament it would be a phantasm. If 
 man divorces the inside from the outside 
 with a view to gratifying his physical 
 senses he abdicates his character as a man 
 to become ah animal; if to feed anything 
 less than his entire selfhood, he presents 
 the spectacle of arrested development. 
 The bodily senses alone can get at the full 
 content, the deep inside of nothing, no mat- 
 ter how pronounced its objectivity, " The 
 truly real is a thing that has an inside." * 
 The more pronounced or attractive the ex- 
 
 1 Von HUgel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 
 vol. ii, p. 264. 
 
24 The Sixth Sense 
 
 ternal substance and form of a material 
 object and the closer we are to it, the 
 greater the difficulty for the average char- 
 acter to gain cognition of its spiritual es- 
 sence. " How hardly shall they that have 
 riches enter into the Kingdom of God," 1 
 Even those who place an undue valuation 
 upon the material, whether possessed of 
 wealth or not, have a like difficulty in pene- 
 trating into the internal realm which lies, 
 beneath and around as well as above and 
 within the external. 2 It is absurd for men 
 to expect to sense the spiritual except with 
 spiritual faculties. The physical world is 
 perceived by a sensory apparatus of the 
 same substance as that of the physical 
 world; the spiritual world is perceived by 
 a sensory apparatus of the same substance 
 as that of the spiritual world. There must 
 be an inherent affinity between the thing 
 apprehended and the organ apprehending. 
 Now the natural man receiveth not the 
 things of the Spirit of God; for they are 
 foolishness unto him ; and he cannot know 
 them because they are spiritually proved. 3 
 
 x Mk. x:23. 
 
 2 Mk. x:24, 25. 
 
 3^-uxtKos dk avOpidiros ov dix €TCLl r * T °v TLvedparos 
 rov Geou : fiupia yap avTta i<rri f icai ov divarai yvtavai, 
 6ti irvevfiariKws dvaKplvcrai. 1 Cor. ii, 14. 
 
The Sixth Sense 2$ 
 
 Reality is a term too often confined to 
 that which can be expressed in terms of 
 bodily senses; whereas it is that which has 
 existence in heaven above, in the earth be- 
 neath, and in the waters under the earth, 
 and which, apart from human perception, 
 though in a minimum degree or passively, 
 plays upon and affects man and his uni- 
 verse, but which reaches its highest poten- 
 tiality manward when, by the volitional 
 operation of human faculties it is subjec- 
 tively apprehended and finds permanent 
 place in his consciousness. Reality is that 
 which supports and feeds the subconscious 
 life by the pressure of its mere existence 
 or laws of being, but which is capable of 
 bestowing larger gifts in proportion to the 
 degree in which it receives conscious ad- 
 mission into the activities of personal ex- 
 perience. It is a law of spiritual or 
 psychic, as well as of physical, existence 
 that every part is related to every other 
 part and influenced by it through either at- 
 traction or energy. In the case of inani- 
 mate matter mere spacial propinquity or 
 distance determines the measure of attrac- 
 tion or energy of object upon object, but 
 where sentient beings are concerned the 
 reaction of conscious volition on environ- 
 
26 The Sixth Sense 
 
 ment is the determining factor regulating 
 the degree of influence released. 
 
 The search for the real in internal proc- 
 esses cannot ignore the external. Con- 
 versely the activities of the workaday 
 world cannot summarily dismiss the in- 
 ternal. 1 The physical senses have a mod- 
 est but indispensable part to play under the 
 primacy of the Mystic Sense. The normal 
 use of the Mystic Sense does not make a 
 mystic. The healthily developed man is 
 mystical though not a mystic. His dom- 
 inating sense is that of the spirit, not that 
 of the flesh. A mystic, technically defined, 
 is a specialist in the subjective or internal, 
 just as a collector is a specialist in the ob- 
 jective or external. There is no danger 
 in either extreme except so far as its votary 
 adopts an exclusive attitude toward its 
 seeming opposite (which really is its com- 
 plement), or toward the balance of human 
 thought and life. A deliberate and per- 
 sistent use of the Mystic Sense without re- 
 spect for the objective would be subversive 
 
 1 " True priority and superiority lies, not with one 
 of these constituents against the other, but with the 
 total subjective — objective interaction or resultant, 
 which is superior, and indeed gives their place and 
 worth to, those interdependent parts." — Von HUgel's 
 Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, p. 114. 
 
The Sixth Sense 27 
 
 of all progress and a reversion to chaos. 
 14 The progress of thought consists in grad- 
 ually separating the series of objective and 
 universally valid, from that of subjective 
 experiences. In the measure that their 
 confusion prevails, man is, to all intents 
 and purposes, mad; and it is this note of 
 insanity that characterizes medicine and re- 
 ligion in their early stages. Dreams and 
 reality are mixed up; subjective connections 
 are objectified." * If the objective and the 
 subjective may not be divorced and set at 
 odds against one another, neither may they 
 be confused. Both errors would result in 
 disorder and hopeless perplexity. 
 
 The serious crux is how, in the realm 
 of the spiritual and the physically intangi- 
 ble, to distinguish between the real and 
 the seeming, the true and the false. This 
 it is the function of the Mystic Sense to do 
 aided by the full complement of inner fac- 
 ulties. In a measure the Mystic Sense, like 
 the bodily senses, acts automatically, but 
 like them it needs special training in order 
 to separate phantasm from reality, to de- 
 termine values, and to grade and classify 
 ideals until they reveal themselves to be 
 ordered unity, not less but more mysterious 
 
 1 Tyrrell's Christianity at the Cross Roads, p. 240. 
 
28 The Sixth Sense 
 
 because more intelligible or apprehensible 
 by the whole man. The first principle to 
 lay down is that no man can treat himself 
 as a unit or credit the findings of his Mys- 
 tic Sense with absolute or final authority 
 until he has tried them by some valid cor- 
 porate test. Neither sight, nor hearing, 
 nor touch, used without regard to the ex- 
 perience of others and respect for it, can 
 fail to lead us astray. The conclusions of 
 the wisest and the competent register them- 
 selves from age to age, coming to us in 
 the shape of beneficent authority to pre- 
 vent a man from repeating work that has 
 already been done and well done. Veri- 
 fication is not contemptuous of authority, 
 though he flouts authority, indeed, who 
 ignores it in a process of individualistic ex- 
 periments. Pure individualism at best can 
 apprehend but a fragment of reality and at 
 worst declines into eccentricity or even in- 
 sanity. Those who are really educated 
 recognize their relation to a social whole 
 and bring the results of their sense percep- 
 tions, before accepting their verdict, to be 
 tested by the age-long, man-wide experi- 
 ences of humanity as formulated in the ac- 
 cepted conclusions of their generation and 
 found in its institutions and customs. Uni- 
 
The Sixth Sense 29 
 
 versal experience is never wholly but only 
 approximately infallible, yet accurate 
 enough to be authoritative for corrective 
 purposes. By respectful attention to it, in- 
 dividual judgment is checked in possible 
 error and at the same time is given oppor- 
 tunity to offer its own contribution to the 
 totality of knowledge, a contribution which 
 may endorse, modify, or enlarge that al- 
 ready reached. In this way only is so- 
 ciety preserved from becoming a mob of 
 eccentrics and fanatics, each whirling in his 
 own little circle. Commerce, art, science, 
 letters, government, religion — in short 
 every department of life you can think of 
 requires such a mode of procedure for the 
 protection of reality in its varied manifes- 
 tations and for the protection of the indi- 
 vidual against himself. But in no condi- 
 tions is a social checking off of findings 
 more essential than in the psychic or spir- 
 itual realm. Mystical experience organ- 
 izes itself or is consciously organized in a 
 sufficient degree to give men that high kind 
 of freedom which comes to us when we act 
 with constant reference to the fact that we 
 are members one of another, so that the 
 experience of the human race is ours where- 
 with to enrich ourselves. A mystic of the 
 
30 The Sixth Sense 
 
 type of St. Theresa, who could hardly see 
 the objective in her rush past form to reach 
 idea, could not be distinguished from the 
 inmate of a madhouse who insists that his 
 tinsel crown is the diadem of a Napoleon, 
 unless she interpreted her personal experi- 
 ence in relation to the spiritual conscious- 
 ness of Christendom. " Once," writes 
 this saint, " when I was holding in my hand 
 the cross of my rosary, He took it from 
 me into His own hand. He returned it; 
 but it was then four large stones incompar- 
 ably more precious than diamonds: the 
 five wounds were delineated on them with 
 the most admirable art. He said to me 
 that for the future that cross would appear 
 so to me always, and so it did. The pre- 
 cious stones were seen, however, only by 
 myself." * A madman would have omit- 
 ted the last sentence. Her mystical ex- 
 perience was individual though it preserved 
 for its foundation a background of uni- 
 versal experience. It united her to her fel- 
 lows, instead of separating her from them. 
 The law of use is as applicable to the 
 Mystic Sense as to the rest of the gifts and 
 endowments which make up the complete- 
 ness of human personality. Its exercise 
 
 1 Quoted by Von HtfcEL, vol. ii, p. 18. 
 
The Sixth Sense 31 
 
 enlarges its capacity and quickens its gen- 
 eral efficiency; if used through the whole 
 range of its opportunities, it becomes a 
 hardy faculty, trustworthy in every sphere 
 where its responsibility lies; specialization 
 of operation in one direction, to the par- 
 tial neglect of other departments open to 
 it, produces acuteness in one direction and 
 dulness in other directions which is char- 
 acteristic of specialists in science; if the 
 specialization is so exclusive as to shut off 
 observation and consideration of every in- 
 terest but one, there must ensue lop-sided 
 growth and maimed personality. 
 
 It is the purpose of this book to trace 
 the operation of the Mystic Sense in normal 
 manhood through the major departments 
 of human experience in order to encourage 
 greater confidence in this wonderful gift, 
 to appeal for a more comprehensive use of 
 it, and to indicate how it may be culti- 
 vated. 
 
 NOTE TO CHAPTER I. 
 
 Von Hugel in his study of the Mystical Element 
 of Religion concludes that there is " no distinct fac- 
 ulty of mystical apprehension." In a passage follow- 
 ing this contention (vol. ii, pp. 283, 284), he so states 
 his position as to make it possible for me to start 
 from a contradictory assertion and reach his con- 
 
32 The Sixth Sense 
 
 elusion. We agree that mysticism is "not everything 
 in any one soul, but something in every soul of man." 
 The entire passage reads as follows: 
 
 "Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a 
 specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical 
 mode of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly 
 not; and that all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic 
 proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism 
 does constitute such an entirely separate, completely 
 self-supported kind of human experience. This de- 
 nial does not, of course, mean that soul does not 
 differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and 
 kind of the recoil ective, intuitive, deeply emotive ele- 
 ment possessed and exercised by it concurrently or 
 alternately with other elements, — the sense of the 
 Infinite within and without the Finite springing up 
 in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contin- 
 gent; nor, again, that these more or less congenital 
 differences and vocations amongst souls cannot be 
 and are not still further developed by grace and 
 heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, 
 so strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem 
 hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But 
 it means that, in even the most purely contingent- 
 seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institutional 
 and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there 
 can never fail to be, some, however, implicit, however 
 slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of 
 the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction 
 with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion 
 for growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, 
 our true home. And,' again, it means, that even the 
 most exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, 
 
The Sixth Sense 33 
 
 for the fulness and healthiness of even the most 
 purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon 
 its past and present contacts with the Contingent, 
 Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and 
 elements, as upon its movement of concentration, 
 and the sense and experience, evoked on occasion of 
 those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite 
 within and around those finitudes and itself. 
 
 " Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full 
 dignity, which consists precisely in being, not every- 
 thing in any one soul, but something in every soul 
 of man; and in presenting at its fullest, the amplest 
 development, among certain special natures with the 
 help of certain special graces and heroisms, or what, 
 in some degree and form, is present in every truly 
 human soul, and in such a soul's every, at all genuine 
 and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. 
 And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain 
 all the strength and escape the weaknesses and 
 dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as regards the 
 mode and character or Religious Experience, Knowl- 
 edge, and Life." 
 
 If my interpretation of this writer be correct, he 
 terms that a " recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive 
 element " which I conceive to be a mystic faculty or 
 sense. The fact that it pervades every part of human 
 personality does not disqualify it from claiming the 
 dignity of a distinctive faculty. It bears a similar 
 relation to the higher endowments of personality 
 which the ether bears to light and to the call of 
 world to world. The Mystic Sense is the enabling 
 faculty, which makes man human. Its pervasiveness 
 does not detract from, rather does it enhance, its dis- 
 
34 The Sixth Sense 
 
 tinctness. To call it an element seems to clothe it 
 in a vagueness which its character does not merit. 
 If man were merely a phase of matter, we could 
 employ the term element with propriety. That which 
 can be only an element in a universe, at any rate may 
 be a faculty or sense in man. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IN RELATION TO HEALTH 
 
 There is nothing so multiple in its com- 
 position, and yet nothing so seemingly sim- 
 ple, so unit-like a unity, as normal person- 
 ality — a normal character englobed by a 
 normal body. Normality is the product 
 of a two-fold force, the true interrelation 
 between the organs of the body and a sim- 
 ilar interrelation between the inner facul- 
 ties, culminating in a rhythmic interaction 
 between the two. The normal man acts 
 in the completeness of his manhood in all 
 that he does, never adopting the role of 
 either mere machine or mere ghost. In 
 so far as the inside and the outside of man 
 work as a unity, the dignity of human per- 
 sonality manifests itself; any departure 
 from harmony approaches that dangerous 
 borderland beyond which lies disintegra- 
 tion and disorder. Disease is a lack of 
 rhythm, a note in the scale out of tune. 
 Health is harmony. 
 
 Up to the time that consciousness of ex- 
 
 35 
 
36 The Sixth Sense 
 
 istence awakens, the processes of life op- 
 erate under the stimulus and protection of 
 the human and physical environment which 
 surround the infant. With the immediate 
 effect of suitable shelter and wholesome 
 nourishment we are fairly conversant. As 
 to just what direct or indirect influence 
 psychic surroundings have upon the subcon- 
 scious life of a baby, we are not in a posi- 
 tion to dogmatize, though we can arrive 
 inferentially at certain rational probabili- 
 ties. 
 
 Apparently the infant, and certainly the 
 child, is extraordinarily sensitive to subtle 
 forces. Acting upon this supposition the 
 Christian Church from the beginning, by 
 a symbolic and sacramental act, has aimed 
 to thrust children deep into the bosom of 
 God by the rite of baptism, and claimed 
 for them not only a place but a place of 
 chief importance in the spiritual society. 
 Instinctively the mother, with exquisite so- 
 licitude, whispers her ideals for the future 
 of her offspring into the ears of the babe 
 at her breast, talking as though to one 
 whose consciousness were awake. In this 
 way Samuels have been raised to Israel. 
 At the close of each day the mother bids 
 her child sleep by singing lullabies and 
 
The Sixth Sense 37 
 
 hanging mystic poppies over wide-awake 
 eyes. She speaks in the highest type of 
 language, in poetry adorned with song, to 
 this little unconscious scrap of humanity. 
 In other words her mystic sense is press- 
 ing upon the mystic sense of her child as 
 naturally and fittingly as her arms fold 
 the infant body and her lips touch its cheek. 
 Unless positive proof to the contrary is 
 adduced, it is safe to believe that it makes 
 a great difference to the child's after life 
 of what sort its psychic environment is dur- 
 ing its first years on earth, whether the 
 minds about it are healthy, expressing 
 themselves healthily, whether the tone of 
 family life is hopeful and spiritual. 
 Though it cannot finally determine the 
 course that the child's life will take, at any 
 rate it affords the best opportunity for 
 making it a worthy course. My convic- 
 tion is, that the difference between good 
 and bad psychic environment for a baby 
 is the same as that between healthy and 
 unhealthy vegetable environment for a 
 young plant. An infant abandoned by its 
 mother to the care of nurses and servants, 
 be the provision for its animal comfort and 
 safety what it may, begins life with a min- 
 imum of opportunity. Man is not born 
 
38 The Sixth Sense 
 
 mere animal but man from the first breath. 
 Therefore from the first breath he needs 
 man's surroundings. In order that his 
 latent character may have its best chance, 
 he ought to be given the most congenial 
 human environment available. If there is 
 no conscious self, at any rate there is a 
 subconscious self, struggling at a very early 
 moment by baby smiles and frets, gropings 
 and babblings to utter itself. Psychology 
 seems to have reached at least this conclu- 
 sion — that the subconscious is, that it is 
 the fundamental part of man, that it is his 
 most sensitive self, never relinquishing 
 that which it grasps and grasping every- 
 thing that touches it. 
 
 Psychic forces may influence mightily 
 the subconscious life of an infant and pro- 
 mote healthy character, but have they any 
 effect on physical well-being? The reply 
 would seem to be that, if at any time in 
 the span of a lifetime they work benefi- 
 cently in this direction, it is probable that 
 they do so from the outset. It would be 
 sheer waste of time to adduce arguments 
 to prove that healthy minds conduce di- 
 rectly to healthy physique. The difficulty 
 is to find the limit of such influence, so vast 
 is it. Physical well-being, however, is not 
 
The Sixth Sense 39 
 
 an end in itself, and it is a subversion of 
 the human order to aim at health of mind 
 or character in order that our physique 
 may be improved. So nicely is human na- 
 ture proportioned and adjusted that it is 
 doubtful whether a person could achieve 
 physical health by becoming good with that 
 sole end in view. Physical health is not 
 essential to a high degree of human effi- 
 ciency, though health of character is and 
 therefore must be sought first because of 
 its priceless value. But it is our just as- 
 sumption that a child with a healthy body 
 is more likely to have a normal inner per- 
 sonality than if it had a sickly body. Outer 
 and inner health act and react and interact 
 so that it is equally true to say that, given 
 a healthy mind and disposition, other 
 things being equal, the body will have the 
 best opportunity of being normal and, 
 whatever its condition, of being used to 
 the best advantage. There can be no con- 
 sideration of higher importance than to 
 make a child sensitive as soon after birth 
 as possible, to his psychic, moral, and mys- 
 tical environment. It will conduce to lofti- 
 ness of character and, for aught we know, 
 to useful longevity and vigor of physique. 
 Only soulless animals can be satisfied 
 
40 The Sixth Sense 
 
 with physical splendor or count muscle suf- 
 ficient in itself. Man by virtue of his man- 
 hood can never live according to merely 
 animal laws. His animal nature itself is 
 ultimately weakened if he does. In pro- 
 portion as he has fine physique he must de- 
 velop a fine mind and character. If not, un- 
 restrained passion and ruin stare him in the 
 face. The body finds its full meaning 
 and so its possibilities, only when the soul 
 has discovered itself and claimed its lib- 
 erty. It is then alone that a whole army 
 of anxieties and fears is scattered, leaving 
 the body free and joyously adventurous, 
 ready to identify its movements with those 
 of the soul. Consequently it is not illogi- 
 cal or untrue to say that the first requisite 
 for physical efficiency of a child is to in- 
 sure that whatever its subconscious life is 
 able to drink in should be sweet, whole- 
 some, and strong. The tone of domestic 
 life, the character of the child's attendants, 
 the whole expanse of human bosom on 
 which it lies and from which it receives 
 nourishment, ought to be as near what one 
 would wish it to be if from the first the 
 little babe had a conscious as well as a sub- 
 conscious self, and were a morally responsi- 
 ble and not a mere non-moral agent. 
 
The Sixth Sense 41 
 
 There can be a healthy domestic environ- 
 ment for the keen-eyed, deep-seeing child 
 only when it has been preceded by a simi- 
 lar environment for the baby. What the 
 tone was for the purely subconscious, it 
 will be for the conscious life when it 
 awakes. Therefore even though parents 
 are skeptical of their influence upon infant 
 subconsciousness, they cannot dispense with 
 attention to its character if they hope to 
 bring beneficial pressure to bear on the 
 child's conscious life. From the first they 
 must learn to deal with a baby as a moral 
 being, impressionable beyond observation. 
 When we turn to man's conscious life 
 and the relation between health of body 
 and a healthy consciousness we are on more 
 demonstrable ground. Experience has 
 proved that our external and internal fac- 
 ulties work in sympathy with one another. 
 If the body is distressed, the inner con- 
 sciousness droops; if the inner conscious- 
 ness becomes morbid or out of sorts, the 
 body, though not always actually falling ill, 
 loses in efficiency. Yet, let it be added, 
 the body is less able to bear psychic illness 
 than the inner self to bear physical illness. 
 The body can never turn psychic suffering 
 into nerve and muscle, but the psychic na- 
 
42 The Sixth Sense 
 
 ture can weave malady into genius through 
 the powerful operation of the Mystic Sense. 
 
 To be healthy is a commendable ambi- 
 tion. Being in good health, our desire is 
 to become as immune as may be to disease, 
 or being ill to give ourselves the best chance 
 of recovery. Health is preserved by keep- 
 ing body and mind in close relation to 
 health-giving processes. It is not our con- 
 cern to discuss in this connection questions 
 of diet, sanitation, hygiene, exercise and 
 similar aids to the promotion of health. 
 Their value is of the first order and may 
 not be ignored or discounted. But just 
 now we are concerned with another part 
 of human nature which has much to do in 
 determining our condition of body — the 
 sense which furnishes us with ideals. 
 
 The objective of an ideal is found in 
 the idea flowing from the mind of God. 
 It is as real to the Mystic Sense as a flower 
 is to sight and smell. An ideal is the re- 
 flection of God's idea and is distorted or 
 true according as the sense which perceives 
 ideas is healthy or diseased. The Mystic 
 Sense relates us to ideas, and enables us to 
 touch, test, see and hear them, as truly as our 
 bodily senses enable us to touch, test, see 
 and hear the world of matter, form and 
 
The Sixth Sense 43 
 
 sound. A healthy ideal is a vitalizing 
 force, an unhealthy ideal is an invitation to 
 disease. Ideals are subjectified ideas. 
 
 In the course of the development of that 
 most experimental of all sciences, medicine, 
 not only has dosing been reduced to a min- 
 imum, but also the natural recuperative 
 powers of the patient have been discovered 
 and are relied upon. The physician tries 
 to open, for the sick, doors into nature's 
 healthiest rooms. The patient being 
 placed in a vitalizing environment is ex- 
 pected by the use of his will and Mystic 
 Sense to respond to it. The physician 
 alone can do but half the work. The will, 
 and not only the willingness, to live, a mys- 
 tical laying hold of the idea of health, is 
 in all cases a valuable, in some an indis- 
 pensable, factor in the process of recov- 
 ery. The suggestion of health predisposes 
 to health; the suggestion of disease is 
 provocative of disease. Medicine may be 
 both a material curative and a sacrament 
 of health. 
 
 The habit of our day has been such as to 
 create in us a marked pathological con- 
 sciousness. The very process which, by 
 slow degrees, has been driving disease to 
 the wall, has produced in us a sensitiveness 
 
44 (The Sixth Sense 
 
 to the idea of disease that is inimical to 
 health. The discovery of the causes of 
 disease has peopled the imagination, even 
 of those who have never looked through 
 a microscope, with an army of hostile germs 
 to the obscuration of those superior influ- 
 ences which conduce to well-being, until we 
 have become chronically nervous of the 
 hidden perils which beset our path* In- 
 significant pains are construed into the 
 symptoms of the last disease discussed in 
 the papers or the advertisement of a pro- 
 prietary nostrum. Momentary fluctua- 
 tions in health send us tripping with anx- 
 ious brow to the doctor. Dabbling in pa- 
 thology is an undesirable occupation, es- 
 pecially for the young. The wrappers of 
 patent medicines, let alone the medicines 
 themselves, have caused more agony than 
 peace of mind and have been more provoca- 
 tive of disease than of health. Happily 
 we are emerging from the patent medicine 
 stage. 
 
 A therapeutic consciousness ought to be 
 the normal consciousness. The forces 
 which make for life are in excess of those 
 which make for death. The universe 
 would go into steady decline were not the 
 dominant forces salutary, and life would 
 
(The Sixth Sense 45 
 
 flicker out like the wick of a candle gut- 
 tered in its socket. There is an inexhausti- 
 ble fund of vitality open to man and we 
 are competent to draw upon it so that we 
 shall receive a maximum rather than a min- 
 imum. Part of the function of science is 
 to put man into such a relation to the 
 nature outside of him as to place the whole- 
 some and remedial at his disposal, pre- 
 venting disease by immunizing him from it. 
 It is the common laws of health which are 
 the most important. With the curious in- 
 consistency which characterizes many hu- 
 man beings, we frequently see men adher- 
 ing to some vigorous regimen of secondary 
 or doubtful importance, while all the time 
 they are flagrantly disobeying some pri- 
 mary law of health. The unity between 
 the outer and the inner necessitates not only 
 an intelligent and scientific treatment but 
 also that which is mystical and more or 
 less mysterious. Prayer, which is at once 
 an appeal to the Source of Life to let loose 
 saving health in our direction and an open- 
 ing up of our being for the reception of 
 hidden and unknown aid, is a higher form 
 of psychic effort than either suggestion or 
 auto-suggestion in that it includes both, 
 though not precluding the concurrent use 
 
46 The Sixth Sense 
 
 of either. Auto-suggestion looks only for 
 self-induced benefit to the patient by ap- 
 plication to an impersonal ideal; prayer 
 does not think merely to apprehend a pas- 
 sive or indifferent remedy, but also to be 
 apprehended by healthful, forceful Person- 
 ality, like but superior to our own. A 
 prayer to the ether would have in its reflex 
 effect a totally different influence on the 
 petitioner from a prayer to what was con- 
 ceived to be a personal God. Similarly 
 the quality of the virtue which is the result 
 of mere ethical culture is as different from 
 that which is the product of correspond- 
 ence with the Christian's God as cotton 
 is from linen. Nor is it that God is inac- 
 tive until we pray. He is operating to the 
 uttermost that our listless or passive or 
 antagonistic personality will allow. The 
 highest personality can do his best to 
 the object of his love only when the. latter 
 adopts a responsive and co-operative atti- 
 tude. The feeble spot in much, if not 
 most, prayer, is that it asks without impor- 
 tunity, or importunes without appropriat- 
 ing. The Mystic Sense must reach up until 
 it feels the hand containing the gift, and 
 take the gift as its own. Auto-suggestion 
 is a lame term indicating the application of 
 
The Sixth Sense 47 
 
 the ideal to the defective. Suggestion is a 
 similar application on the part of another 
 to a companion. With a background of 
 prayer, the insomnia patient can with profit 
 watch the dream sheep go through the 
 hedge, or lay himself in the cradle of old 
 nursery rhymes, or welcome to his bedside 
 the veiled legions of slumber as they troop 
 forth on their silent errand from the pres- 
 ence of Him who giveth His beloved sleep. 
 Faith^ which is simply the highest opera- 
 tion oTthe mystic sense, is as necessary to 
 the complete work of healing as in the 
 days when Jesus said, " According to thy 
 faith be it unto thee." It appropriates to 
 the full the remedial contents of scientific 
 agencies which, under its touch become sac- 
 ramental, and clothes the life in the soft 
 robe of unanxious peace and serene cheer- 
 fulness. It is easy enough for a well man 
 to talk to the sick concerning the desira- 
 bility and curative value of a therapeutic 
 consciousness. The depressed soul resents 
 the necessity of being called upon to act 
 independently of the body and in opposi- 
 tion to it. Most patients, too, for the time 
 being are inclined to count each one his 
 own case unique. But the Mystic Sense is 
 wonderfully elastic. Cheerfulness comes 
 
48 The Sixth Sense 
 
 by being cheerful, hope by being hopeful, 
 calmness by being calm, healthymindedness 
 by being healthyminded. This is the work 
 of the Mystic Sense living in the realm of 
 vigor even when the body is in distress. 
 When the Mystic Sense goes exploring in 
 high altitudes it never comes back empty 
 handed. Even when it fails to return with 
 health of body, it holds in its grasp health 
 of mind. A blithe spirit in a feeble body 
 can accomplish more than a sluggish spirit 
 in a robust body. There are two kinds 
 of healthymindedness — temperamental 
 and acquired. The latter is the most pow- 
 erful and may be had by anyone who culti- 
 vates his Mystic Sense. 
 
 The extent to which the Mystic Sense 
 works toward a cure cannot be formulated. 
 It varies with conditions. Of this we can 
 be assured. It is always salutary, fre- 
 quently indispensable. Diseases caused or 
 induced by an abuse or morbid use of the 
 imagination cannot be banished without 
 the aid of the Mystic Sense as the chief 
 agent. The imagination must be cured 
 before the sickness can be cured, and there 
 are instances when the cure of the imagina- 
 tion is the cure of the disease. That is 
 
The Sixth Sense 49 
 
 none the less a disease, the seat of which 
 is in the psychic, rather than in the physical 
 part of self. 
 
 Two things remain to be said. First, 
 our day is laying a dangerous accent on 
 the value of mere physical life in man. It 
 tends to foster physical self-consciousness 
 and is an aspect of degrading materialism. 
 All the efforts being put forth in the direc- 
 tion of making it possible for the physic- 
 ally feeble to survive, are dangerous, un- 
 less followed up by commensurate efforts 
 to make them fit as characters. Mere ex- 
 istence and mere longevity are false gods. 
 
 It is haply justifiable for men of low 
 breed, who honestly think this life the only 
 one, to grasp at all its available gifts, and 
 struggle to retain it on any terms for as 
 long a period as may be. But not so 
 among those who have risen to a knowl- 
 edge of the meaning of immortality, even 
 in its lesser aspects, of the perpetuation of 
 the nation and the race, and the persistence 
 of a man's work and influence among men 
 after he himself has vanished. For such 
 there is a higher food than mere life, beside 
 which mere survival looks cheap and worth- 
 less. 
 
5<3 The Sixth Sense 
 
 " A man must live, we justify 
 Low shift and trick to treason high, 
 A little vote for a little gold 
 To a whole senate bought and sold, 
 By that self-evident reply. 
 
 But is it so? Pray tell me why 
 Life at such cost you have to buy? 
 In what religion were you told 
 A man must live? 
 
 There are times when a man must die, 
 
 Imagine, for a battle-cry, 
 
 From soldiers, with a sword to hold, — 
 From soldiers, with the flag unrolled, — 
 
 This coward's whine, this liar's lie, — 
 A man must live ! " x 
 
 There is, however, a type of heroism 
 which is not as uncommon as it seems to be 
 for it is hidden — the type to which Kip- 
 ling refers when he says: 
 
 " If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 
 To serve your turn long after they are gone, 
 And so hold on, when there is nothing in you 
 Except the will which says to them: * Hold 
 on!'"— ■ 
 
 and once more we quote from another 
 writer: 
 
 " Let us, for one thing, never forget that 
 
 1 Charlotte Perkins Stetson's In this our World. 
 
The Sixth Sense 51 
 
 physical health is not the true end of hu- 
 man life, but only one of its most important 
 means and conditions. . . • Death may 
 and should be risked, the slow but certain 
 undermining of the physical health may be 
 laudably embarked on, if only the mind 
 and character are not damaged, and if the 
 end to be attained is found to be necessary 
 or seriously helpful, and unattainable by 
 other means." * 
 
 Secondly, special and mystical means of 
 promoting or regaining health must have 
 as a background the accumulated knowl- 
 edge and scientific skill of the day. If 
 there are individual exceptions here and 
 there, they go to prove the rule. We can 
 no more ignore the history of medical and 
 chemical science, the findings of the micro- 
 scope and laboratory, without disaster, than 
 we can cut our country off from the tradi- 
 tions, laws and customs of yesterday with- 
 out similar results. On the other hand, 
 it is at least equal folly to flout or dis- 
 credit the mystical experience of the ages. 
 Human life, individually and corporately, 
 is a unit, and due recognition must be given 
 to all that goes to make it up. 
 
 1 The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, pp. 57, 
 58. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 IN RELATION TO THOUGHT 
 
 The mind includes the Mystic Sense in 
 somewhat a similar way to the manner in 
 which the body includes the physical senses. 
 But the Mystic Sense can be, indeed must 
 be, considered as a distinct faculty having 
 a peculiar function in the formation of that 
 product of the mind called thought, which 
 is " the effort to win over facts to ideas, 
 or to adjust ideas to facts." * The Mys- 
 tic Sense can and does operate when the 
 rationalizing faculty is reverently silent, 
 and by its operation prepares new material 
 for pure reason to consider. 
 
 There is no specifically intellectual or- 
 gan. It is the whole man which appre- 
 hends knowledge just as it is the whole 
 man and not an exclusively religious part 
 of him, which apprehends and is appre- 
 hended by eternities and infinities. It is 
 popularly supposed that science and math- 
 
 iRoYCE's The World and the Individual, First 
 Scries, p. 58. 
 
 52 
 
The Sixth Sense 53 
 
 ematics call for the exercise of one set of 
 faculties, and philosophy and religion an- 
 other. Whereas the truth is that the same 
 faculties are used for all alike in pretty 
 much the same relation to one another. 
 The Mystic Sense is as indispensable to sci- 
 ence as it is to piety. Its method of opera- 
 tion is precisely the same in the one sphere 
 as in the other. 
 
 We can best appreciate the important 
 part the Mystic Sense plays in science by a 
 survey of the foundations of accepted sci- 
 entific fact. The whole body of our 
 knowledge concerning the material uni- 
 verse is constructed upon a few ultimates, 
 chief among them being the ether and the 
 atom. The physical senses, so busy in that 
 workshop of science, the laboratory, cease 
 to be important when we deal with these 
 fundamentals. The discoverer of ether 
 never perceived it by touch, taste, smell, 
 sight or hearing. Newton postulated it be- 
 cause he said it was a necessity, exactly as 
 we postulate the existence of God. How 
 could there be attraction across the meas- 
 ureless spaces which separate worlds if 
 there were not some intangible substance? 
 The ether was therefore discovered to or- 
 der by the Mystic Sense and accepted be- 
 
54 The Sixth Sense 
 
 cause it proved a good working hypothesis. 
 We are solemnly told by physicists that it is 
 an " elastic solid/' a " pervasive fluid," a 
 " tenuous substance." And yet when we 
 chase this elusive something into a corner 
 we find it to be "that which undulates," a 
 form of motion — well, so is a field mouse ! 
 Again the atomic theory, first conceived 
 by the Greeks, was restated by Dalton more 
 than 2,000 years later, who brought it 
 down " from the clouds to the laboratory 
 and factory." But neither Dalton nor 
 anyone else ever touched an atom, saw an 
 atom, heard an atom, smelt an atom, or 
 tasted an atom, ultimate of matter that it 
 is. The physicist claims, however, " that 
 though he cannot handle or see them, the 
 atoms and molecules are as real as the ice- 
 crystals in the cirrhus clouds that he cannot 
 reach — as real as the unseen members of 
 a meteoric swarm whose death glow is lost 
 in the sunshine, or which sweep past us 
 unentangled in the night " — that the atoms 
 are in fact " not merely helps to puzzled 
 mathematicians, but physical realities." l 
 All this may be so. Nevertheless both the 
 ether and the atom are so little material 
 
 1 See Macfie's Science, Matter and Immortality, an 
 admirable volume on this entire topic. 
 
The Sixth Sense 55 
 
 as to escape physical perception as com- 
 pletely as a ghost, and so nearly spiritual 
 as to be perceived by the Mystic Sense with 
 sufficient clearness to enable the scientist 
 to use them as his fundamental hypothesis. 
 If this reasoning be true, the ultimate of 
 matter is spiritual and not material ! 
 
 As with the ether so with the atom, it 
 was a scientific necessity. The Mystic 
 Sense contributed it to the laboratory, 
 where it has been contentedly accepted as 
 the ultimate of matter, until the other day, 
 when someone opened the window of the 
 atom to discover that it was a huge uni- 
 verse, of which a p corpuscle or electron 
 was the least particle, related to the atom 
 as a mote dancing in the sunbeam is to the 
 room where it is. No sense but the Mys- 
 tic Sense has yet sensed the electron. Not 
 only, then, has science accepted the findings 
 of the Mystic Sense, but, having accepted 
 them, it has in the main not had reason to 
 distrust them and continues confidently to 
 base its research upon the foundation thus 
 laid. 
 
 The freshest of more recent scientific 
 discoveries, evolution, is as much the child 
 of the Mystic Sense as of inductive reason- 
 ing. It was the Mystic Sense of ancient 
 
56 The Sixth Sense 
 
 philosophers, exploring the unseen, whicK 
 first descried it on the horizon as the sailor 
 at the masthead spies the distant land. 
 Darwin was the helmsman who steered the 
 ship to port. He rationalized it and ap- 
 plied it as a working hypothesis. It is in- 
 structive to note that Darwin began his 
 career with a rather acute sense of the mys- 
 tical. He had a keen appetite for poetry, 
 and pictures, and the music in King's Col- 
 lege Chapel " gave him intense pleasure, 
 so that his backbone would sometimes 
 shiver." 1 He even began preparation for 
 Holy Orders. In later life the interests 
 that meant so much to him in youth died. 
 " My mind," he says, u seems to have be- 
 come a kind of machine for finding general 
 laws out of large collections of facts, but 
 why this should have caused the atrophy 
 of that part of the brain alone, on which 
 the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. 
 A man with a mind more highly organized 
 or better constituted than mine, would not, 
 I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had 
 to live my life again, I would have made 
 a rule to read some poetry and listen to 
 some music at least once a week; for per- 
 
 1 Darwin's Autobiography. 
 
The Sixth Sense 57 
 
 haps the parts of my brain now atrophied 
 would thus have been kept active through 
 use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of 
 happiness, and may possibly be injurious 
 to the intellect, and more probably to the 
 moral character, by enfeebling the emo- 
 tional part of our nature," It would be 
 more accurate, perhaps, to explain this loss, 
 not by atrophy but by too narrow special- 
 ization. His Mystic Sense and powerful 
 imagination were not dead. They were 
 centred on a single object. Having de- 
 veloped his Mystic Sense in one or all the 
 ways open to him, a man may abandon its 
 use in every direction but one. Christian 
 worship, poetry, music prepare the Mystic 
 Sense for that daring creation of hypoth- 
 eses characteristic of Darwin. Without 
 his power of hypothesis he could never have 
 become more than a mere collector of the 
 jackdaw order. He is his own best wit- 
 ness to the truth of this assertion. He 
 says, " I have steadily endeavored to keep 
 my mind free so as to give up any hy- 
 pothesis, however much beloved (and I 
 cannot resist forming one on every sub- 
 ject), as soon as facts are shown to be 
 opposite to it," adding that he could not 
 
£8 The Sixth Sense 
 
 remember " a single first formed hypoth- 
 esis which had not after a time to be given 
 up or modified." 
 
 It is one of the chief functions of the 
 Mystic Sense to present hypotheses. With- 
 out hypothesis the reason is a shorn Sam- 
 son. A goal must be postulated, otherwise 
 the wood could not be seen for the trees, 
 and the intellect would be hopelessly lost 
 in a tangle of underbrush and smothered 
 by the weight of its own learning. " While 
 theory is aimless and impotent without ex- 
 perimental check, experiment is dead with- 
 out some theory passing beyond the limits 
 of ascertained knowledge to control it. 
 Here, as in all parts of natural knowledge, 
 the immediate presumption is strongly in 
 favor of the simplest hypothesis ; the main 
 support, the unfailing clue, of physical sci- 
 ence is the principle that, nature being a 
 rational cosmos, phenomena are related on 
 the whole in the manner that conceptual 
 reason would anticipate." * Generalization 
 of a tentative character precedes and 
 gives a starting point for induction. Hy- 
 pothesis is more often the child of intuitive 
 
 1 Sir Joseph Larmor in his Wilde Lecture (1908) 
 quoted by Sir Oliver Lodge in Reason and Belief, p. 
 172. 
 
The Sixth Sense 59 
 
 processes which capture thought by quick 
 assault than of slower and more analyzable 
 forces. First comes hypothesis, then the 
 accumulation of data, finally, when all 
 available evidence is in, rejection and the 
 adoption of fresh hypothesis, or modifica- 
 tion, or verification. " A bundle of dis- 
 connected facts is only the raw material for 
 an investigation: their mere collection is 
 the very earliest stage in the process; and 
 even while collecting them there is nearly 
 always some system, some place, some idea 
 under trial." * The spiritual contents of 
 the physical universe are, in part, evolution, 
 the ether, the atom and such like. They 
 bear material names, but they are ideas, out 
 of reach of our sensory nerves, and capable 
 of being perceived, first dimly and then 
 clearly, only through the Mystic Sense. 
 They form the allegorical department of 
 scientific thought, and are to the reality as 
 the Apocalypse is to the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. 
 
 It would be without special gain, how- 
 ever easy, to multiply illustrations of the 
 princely place which the Mystic Sense holds 
 in scientific research. Let us, therefore, 
 turn for a moment to mathematics with its 
 
 1 Reason and Belief, p. x8x. 
 
60 The Sixth Sense 
 
 array of imperturbable digits and prosaic 
 facts. No sooner does the mathematician 
 begin to move, than he finds it necessary 
 to call to his aid the self-same faculty, 
 which furnishes the physicist with his ether 
 and atoms, and enables the worshipper to 
 pray. Else how could he explore the fifth 
 dimension, and define a line as having 
 length without breadth, or a plane su- 
 perficies as having only length and breadth, 
 or a point as having no parts? It 
 is not astonishing that the mathemati- 
 cian, " Lewis Carroll," was the author of 
 those most delicious imaginative works 
 of immortal fame, " Alice in Won- 
 derland " and " Through the Looking- 
 Glass." His vocation prepared and 
 trained him for his avocation, and his avo- 
 cation gave him new efficiency in his voca- 
 tion. That which made him able to write 
 the story of dreamland equipped him as an 
 able scholar — the use in proper relation 
 to his other mental gifts of the Mystic 
 Sense. Similarly it is not surprising, but 
 to be expected that Bacon, Pasteur, and 
 Kelvin were, each in his own degree, re- 
 ligious men. They are the normal men of 
 science, La Place, Huxley, and Haeckel 
 
The Sixth Sense 6l! 
 
 being eccentrics and developed in a lop- 
 sided way. 
 
 Invention, to turn to the department of 
 practical science, relates the same story. 
 Long before men saw, they dreamed. The 
 locomotive was a vision before it was a 
 fact; the aeroplane began as an idea, sting- 
 ing men into adventurous experiment, be- 
 fore it spread its wings above the earth; 
 men talked across vast spaces in thought 
 before the earliest cable ticked its message, 
 or the wireless system enthralled us by its 
 wizardry. The Mystic Sense is prophetic 
 and sees to-morrow as though it were to- 
 day, dimly first and then with increasing 
 clearness. " Without much dim appre- 
 hension, no clear perception; nothing is 
 more certain than this." * 
 
 Still once more, when we turn to litera- 
 ture the Mystic Sense is a pole-star. His- 
 tory is a museum of the curios of yesterday, 
 
 1 The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, p. 265. 
 
 The author quotes Kant — "we can be mediately 
 conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no 
 distinct consciousness." " The field of our obscure 
 apprehensions, — that is, apprehensions and impres- 
 sions of which we are not directly conscious, although 
 we can conclude without doubt that we have them — 
 is immeasureable, whereas clear apprehensions con- 
 stitute but a very few points within the complete ex- 
 tent of our mental life." 
 
62 The Sixth Sense 
 
 a pile of bones, a series of occurrences, a 
 collection of bald facts as cold and bare 
 as a heap of pebbles, until the Mystic Sense 
 enters the sterile valley and brings with it 
 the breath of life. An idiot with a mem- 
 ory can collect past facts as easily as a wee 
 toddler can collect shells on the sea shore 
 and to as good purpose. But it needs a 
 man who, however vast his stock of infor- 
 mation, possesses a developed Mystic Sense 
 to classify facts and reveal their insides. 
 Facts never tell the truth to an unimag- 
 inative mind. There is a higher form of 
 accuracy and a deeper presentation of real- 
 ity than a bare statement. Figures and 
 prose, taken alone, are blind guides. 
 
 In normal childhood the Mystic Sense 
 gets admirable training through the poetry 
 and imaginative literature that belongs to 
 the nursery in every nation. It is justly 
 considered improper to confine a child's 
 education to the multiplication table, sci- 
 entific statement, religious dogma, and the 
 memorizing of historic fact. The kinder- 
 garten, be its merits or defects what they 
 may, is an endeavor to rouse the young 
 mind to accurate observation and calcula- 
 tion through the imaginative faculty. Al- 
 legory, fable, and multiplied illustration 
 
The Sixth Sense 63 
 
 form the natural vehicle for imparting 
 knowledge to the young. The abstract is 
 unintelligible, the bald is uninteresting; 
 vivid description, poetical and highly col- 
 ored, is the main road to knowledge. Care 
 is taken to introduce fact in its best and 
 prettiest clothing. Human life has a crav- 
 ing for the beautiful which is a phase of 
 strength and an aspect of the real. Litera- 
 ture is the recorded expression of human 
 life and thought, colored by the character 
 of its various authors. 1 Art is literature 
 on canvas, in vibrant sounds, and in stone. 
 Poetry is a necessary and not an orna- 
 mental part of literature. It is to a large 
 extent the mystical embodiment of prose, 
 or perhaps it would be truer to say that it 
 bears somewhat the same relation to prose 
 that hypothesis does to science. At any 
 rate it is the distinctive literature of the 
 Mystic Sense. It is the literature of the 
 young nation just as much as it is of the 
 young child. The earliest and the most 
 permanent literature extant is either poetry 
 or poetical in idea. Imagination, a child 
 
 1 " Literature consists of those writings which in- 
 terpret the meanings of nature and life in words of 
 charm and power, touched with the personality of the 
 author, in artistic forms of permanent interest." — Van 
 Dyke's The Spirit of America, p. 243. 
 
64 The Sixth Sense 
 
 of the Mystic Sense, which runs wild unless 
 disciplined, was born earlier than more 
 sober offspring of the mind. Poetry is the 
 parent of prose. The habit of the nursery 
 or schoolroom is the reproduction on a 
 small scale of the method of history — 
 first poetry, then prose. He rules a na- 
 tion who furnishes it with songs. There 
 is no firmer foundation for national life 
 than a great legendary epic or a garland of 
 folk songs. The better, if not the larger, 
 part of the Old Testament is poetic. 
 Even the historical books do not pretend 
 to be history as Gibbon and Green are his- 
 tory. Legend and history had not been 
 distinguished from one another in those 
 days. Legend is usually elaborately col- 
 ored interpretation of fact where the ac- 
 tual occurrence has been lost in the interpre- 
 tation, to such an extent that it can never be 
 recovered or can only be guessed at. By 
 subjective process, somewhat akin to reflec- 
 tion or digestion, the objective gains a new 
 and transfigured self apart from and in- 
 dependent, it may be, of the original ob- 
 ject. Thus legend is over-subjectified his- 
 tory. The outside is ignored for the sake 
 of the inside. 
 
 Poetry and wholesome fiction must find 
 
[The Sixth Sense 65 
 
 permanent place in the life of a normal 
 man. Do not delude yourself into think- 
 ing that your chief or only guides in life 
 are logic and sense perception. They are 
 not. Intuition and sentiment lead you 
 twice for every once these others do. It is 
 so much more comfortable, not to say hon- 
 est and reasonable, to acknowledge frankly 
 the primacy of your leaders, than to follow 
 them and pretend all the while that you are 
 following other guides, which is a species 
 of disloyalty. Scientist, inventor, mathe- 
 matician, man of letters, alike are not quite 
 true to fact when they claim that pure rea- 
 son and an exclusive process of induction 
 control their mental operations. I would 
 raise the question whether there is any such 
 thing as the exclusively inductive method. 
 Is it not truer to speak of the deductive- 
 inductive than of the inductive? The 
 Mystic Sense, with its adventurous and 
 sometimes blundering progress, holds so im- 
 portant a place that without it logic and 
 induction would be as grist without a mill. 
 To reach knowledge by " pure reason " is 
 as impossible as to reach the sun with a 
 stepladder. Even supposing it were pos- 
 sible to bring bare reason over against bald 
 fact, the result would reach only a degree 
 
66 \The Sixth Sense 
 
 beyond the achievement of a pig that 
 counts, or a jackdaw that gathers a store 
 of glittering objects. 
 
 I have heard scrupulous people complain 
 of the effect of fairy lore, nursery fables, 
 and imaginative traditions like that of 
 Santa Claus, upon child life. It may be a 
 question to consider, but it is dealing with a 
 mote rather than with a beam. Cheap 
 current literature, and the psychologically 
 false story, which is characteristic of many 
 of our magazines, are far more of an in- 
 jury to heart and mind than the imag- 
 inative excesses of the nursery. The ob- 
 jection to the latter is not in the substance, 
 but in the unnecessary attempts to deceive 
 and to confuse objective and subjective in 
 the child mind. Santa Claus is a harmless 
 creature viewed as the Spirit of Christmas. 
 [When he is turned into a chimney god to 
 whom written or spoken prayers are of- 
 fered, it is another matter. Who can with- 
 stand the pathos of the little sister's death, 
 resulting from her petition before the fire- 
 place for a new toy for her baby brother? 
 The flames took her and turned her into a 
 burnt sacrifice to Santa Claus. 
 
 Supply is usually responsive to demand 
 and the amount of imaginative literature 
 
The Sixth Sense 67 
 
 and versifying in the journals of the day is 
 a fair indication of the appetite for that 
 which stimulates the Mystic Sense in let- 
 ters. Also its hectic character is indica- 
 tive of the wild state of the psychic life 
 of the readers. The normal is counted 
 uninteresting, and the abnormal, in inci- 
 dent and character, is portrayed. A 
 steady diet of such reading leaves unhealthy 
 blotches, indelible and disfiguring, on hu- 
 man life. Even in more serious literature 
 the story of the abnormal may be given 
 too great prominence. Valuable as the 
 late Professor James's Varieties of Reli- 
 gious Experience may be, it has the fault 
 of studying the abnormal as though it were 
 the ordinary, leaving the great stretches 
 of healthy religious experience practically 
 untouched. If a physiologist were to give 
 his main attention to men with one green 
 and one brown eye, or with the heart on 
 the right instead of the left side, or some 
 kindred peculiarities, the sum total of his 
 research would not contribute much to our 
 knowledge of the normal man. 
 
 To conclude: every man who respects 
 his mind, be his vocation what it may, has 
 need to guard his Mystic Sense from de- 
 filement, and afford it opportunity for de- 
 
68 The Sixth Sense 
 
 velopment. In what is technically known 
 as education great stress is laid on pro- 
 portion and subject matter. This is no 
 less a necessity in maturer life than it is 
 in youth. The same result ensues upon 
 reading anything that comes to hand, that 
 ensues upon eating anything that comes 
 to hand. So important a thing is it, not 
 only that we should be able to create hy- 
 potheses, but also that our hypotheses 
 should be sound, that we must furnish our 
 Mystic Sense with the same safeguards 
 and stimulus that we afford our physical 
 senses. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 IN RELATION TO CHARACTER 
 
 Good character is the reaction upon the 
 whole self caused by the Mystic Sense 
 as a habit visioning, and the will claim- 
 ing, the excellent. It is the result on per- 
 sonality of a sustained effort to transcend 
 the existing relation to life and its condi- 
 tions, a state of chronic dissatisfaction with 
 the progress and achievement of the mo- 
 ment, which makes the good mediocre by 
 contrasting it with the superior and cov- 
 eting the best conceivable as man's right 
 and heritage. 
 
 The Mystic Sense is always finding a 
 more excellent way. Excepting when 
 taught to play casuistical tricks, it does not 
 look for the conventionally proper, or rest 
 comfortably in it. 1 It launches out into 
 
 1 " The wealthy class in Rome and all over Italy- 
 began to conform to that conventional code of pro- 
 priety by which the rich seem always destined, in the 
 progress of civilization, to become more and more 
 enslaved, till finally they lost all feeling for what is 
 serious and genuine in life. The new generation fol- 
 
 69 
 
JO The Sixth Sense 
 
 that noble freedom which, from a group 
 of probabilities, selects that which is 
 farthest removed from suspicion of self- 
 ish considerations and promises ulti- 
 mately the best social results. On the 
 other hand it is not disregardful of the ac- 
 cepted code of morals. This it takes as 
 its foundation, individualizing it for per- 
 sonal use, and boldly submitting proposi- 
 tions for improvement to the social con- 
 science for approval, modification, or 
 rejection. Such approval, modification, or 
 rejection is never a purely formal matter 
 registered in the dictum of a tribunal but 
 rather the culmination of a process akin, 
 in the moral sphere, to that which is 
 termed " natural selection " in the physical 
 sphere. 
 
 lowed their example with alacrity, and preached the 
 new conventions with a passionate vehemence which 
 must have been highly exasperating to those of their 
 seniors who were still attached to the simplicity of 
 primitive manners. Amongst those who protested 
 against this development there was, however, one 
 prominent figure of the younger age, Marcus Porcius 
 Cato, a man of rich and noble family, and a de- 
 scendant of Cato the Censor. His puritan spirit re- 
 volted against the tyranny of fashion to which the 
 golden youth of Rome wished to make him conform; 
 he would walk in the streets without shoes or tunic, 
 to accustom himself, as he said, only to blush at things 
 which were shameful in themselves, and not merely 
 by convention." — Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of 
 Rome, vol. i, pp. 135, 136. 
 
The Sixth Sense Jl 
 
 Character and morality are not synon- 
 ymous. Strong character may be good 
 or bad, the latter being the result of the 
 active exercise of the will in a conflict with 
 goodness; it is the transformation of evil 
 from a mere negation into a positive, per- 
 sonal force by conscious volition. But our 
 study is of good character and its culti- 
 vation, so that when the word " character " 
 is used the determinative " good " is un- 
 derstood. 
 
 Character is the result of the corre- 
 spondence of personality with the best that 
 it knows. It is measured by the faithful- 
 ness with which it responds to opportu- 
 nity. A man with small opportunity, who 
 is scrupulously conscientious in availing 
 himself of all the privilege afforded him, 
 becomes a stronger character than another, 
 who, with his great opportunity, is less 
 loyal in his use of it. Of course the great- 
 est character is that which knows ideal 
 virtue and consistently aims to bring up 
 life to its level. Character is determined 
 by reaction upon environment, external 
 and internal. There are many suitable 
 environments possible for every character, 
 more than there are unsuitable ones, as the 
 vicissitudes of most lives testify. Char- 
 
72 The Sixth Sense 
 
 acter is thus bound up closely with individ- 
 ual personality and is never abstract, as 
 morality is in the science of ethics. Char- 
 acter is created and disclosed by that phase 
 of experience in which the Mystic Sense is 
 busied in photographing ideals on the film 
 monopolized by the actual to the discom- 
 fiture and obliteration of the latter. 
 Better to-morrows are obtruded on poor 
 to-days, partly by virtue of the fact that 
 the Mystic Sense is naturally in constant 
 contact with the ideally best, sensing and 
 appropriating it just as the body, without 
 conscious effort on our part, senses and ap- 
 propriates light and air, and partly be- 
 cause, either feebly or vigorously, most 
 men claim for themselves by deliberate 
 volition a larger life than that which is. 
 
 The possession of character is the sole 
 justification of self-respect. Self-respect 
 ensues upon the growth of character, and 
 is to character what perfume is to the 
 flower. It is due to the consciousness of 
 having within ourselves that which is 
 worthy — not mere moral acquiescence but 
 something we have made peculiarly our 
 own by active effort. It is a high form 
 of the consciousness which inspires an in- 
 ventor when he has constructed a piece 
 
The Sixth Sense 73 
 
 of mechanism. Self-respect is a witness 
 to our having been individualized and is 
 indifferent to external possessions or aught 
 that is our own by virtue of favor and 
 chance rather than by merit. Self-respect 
 runs into self-conceit and stagnation when 
 it rests content with that which is. It 
 never dawdles in its movements nor loafs 
 on the street corners. Self-respect be- 
 comes self-contempt and self-abasement 
 when our attention is turned from our cher- 
 ished ideals and actual progress, and fixed 
 upon our defects and failures. Penitence 
 is not a bar but a necessity to character 
 and its fragrant effluence, self-respect. 
 
 Character calls for and expects commu- 
 nal respect in the same degree that it re- 
 ceives self-respect. Reputation should 
 be commensurate with character. It is 
 possible for men to have the unmerited 
 respect of their fellows without having 
 self-respect. This is due to the practice 
 of deceit, conscious or unconscious, which 
 enables them to simulate character and 
 have appearance without corresponding re- 
 ality. To the man of character, it is as 
 truly a pain to be overestimated as to be 
 underestimated. He can afford to lose 
 his reputation, though he can never be 
 
74 The Sixth Sense 
 
 exempt from the keen pain involved. In 
 the process of achieving character, the 
 great frequently, if not always, have to 
 endure the withholding of respect on the 
 part of the community. Seldom does a 
 man make a contribution to progress with- 
 out being temporarily at least discredited 
 by those whom most of all he is aiming 
 to benefit. Self-respect towers at such mo- 
 ments. A man of character will trust him- 
 self when all men doubt him but make al- 
 lowance for their doubting, too; he will 
 wait and not be tired by waiting, or being 
 lied about, won't deal in lies, or being 
 hated won't give way to hating. 1 
 
 Ideals become tasks and tasks become 
 character in social experience. " A tal- 
 ent," says Goethe, " shapes itself in still- 
 ness, but a character in the tumult of the 
 world." " That which would have re- 
 mained only a quality in (our Lord), if 
 He had stayed in the desert, becomes a 
 life when He goes forth into the world." 
 The ultimate test of a man's worth is his 
 character and not his degree of morality 
 — his power of volitional reaction upon 
 environment, objective and subjective. 
 
 Every man at some time during his ca* 
 1 Kipling's //— . 
 
The Sixth Sense J$ 
 
 reer, — most men for a considerable por- 
 tion of it, and many from beginning to end, 
 — covets character. Those who fail to 
 claim it for themselves seldom fail to ad- 
 mire it in others. Frequently they put as 
 much effort into pretending they have it as 
 would win for them the real thing. They 
 pay the price of gold for tinsel. Character 
 has commercial value and sometimes 
 men are honest according to law solely 
 because it is politic, or polite accord- 
 ing to social requirement because it pays. 
 But the honesty and courtesy of such 
 men are not virtues. They are hand- 
 maidens of covetousness. They contrib- 
 ute nothing to self-respect. They have no 
 moral content, and serve only to aid in bol- 
 stering up a vicious characteristic. How- 
 ever, it is a tribute to the kingliness of 
 character that, either for its market value 
 or because of its inherent worth, men 
 clothe themselves in its appearance when 
 they do not seek the substance. 
 
 The substance may be had by every 
 man. Man not only is, but also acknowl- 
 edges himself to be, responsible for what 
 he is. He makes the confession when he 
 keeps his worst self from the public gaze 
 even though it promises him no special 
 
j6 The Sixth Sense 
 
 gain. The extreme to which the sense of 
 personal responsibility and accountability 
 goes is evidenced by the fact that, though 
 for others we find it difficult to believe 
 in the closing of the possibility of self-im- 
 provement and ultimate loss fixed and final, 
 many, perhaps most of us, think and act in 
 our own case as though we at least shall 
 be held strictly accountable for our char- 
 acter and reap as we live. If we had no 
 responsibility for what we were and did, 
 there would be no room for shame, were 
 we to be publicly known to be exactly what 
 we are. Rob Henley's poem of its de- 
 fiant note and we are in the presence of 
 sober fact: 
 
 "It matters not how strait the gate, 
 How charged with punishments the scroll — 
 I am the Master of my fate — 
 I am the Captain of my soul." 
 
 Character, like fruit, gets rich flavor 
 through living in a climate of extremes 
 which give robustness by theatening very 
 existence. The story of the transgression 
 of Adam and his consort is illustrative 
 rather than singular. The temptation set 
 was the very stiffest to which human life, 
 being what it is, could be subjected — a 
 demand for self-discipline and obedience 
 
'{The Sixth Sense JJ 
 
 to mysterious law. It is interesting that 
 the first recorded strain put upon the hu- 
 man will was not to do rather than to do. 
 Seemingly it was the limitation of free- 
 dom, the restriction of choice, the nar- 
 rowing of experience. In no other condi- 
 tions could man have had a chance to 
 gain character. Had our first human an- 
 cestors won their day without lapse, every 
 succeeding generation would have had to 
 do the same. You cannot inherit char- 
 acter. You must win it. Temptation is 
 never eliminated from human life, as we 
 know it. Its conquest in one form opens 
 the door to its appearance in another form. 
 Our earliest human ancestors having 
 known the higher chose the lower. But 
 this did not, either in their own case or in 
 that of their offspring through a thousand 
 generations, close the door to the attain- 
 ment of character. Human life begins in 
 conditions which threaten character and 
 therefore becomes eligible for character. 
 The complaint that there are those in the 
 world who, because of hopeless environ- 
 ment, never have an opportunity, finds 
 sympathetic echo in every heart, but it does 
 not absolve us from responsibility to our 
 own opportunity. 
 
78 The Sixth Sense 
 
 Much is made of heredity by those who 
 know little or nothing of the controversies 
 which gather about the study of its opera- 
 tion. The popular interpretation presses 
 hard upon its thorns and forgets even the 
 existence of its blossoms. " The sins of 
 the fathers are visited upon the children 
 unto the third and fourth generation," is 
 the dominating thought which, by exclu- 
 sive consideration, diseases the mind of 
 many a man until his whole imaginative 
 nature is employed in the service of some 
 congenital, or supposed congenital, weak- 
 ness to make him its victim. In this way 
 fatalism is induced. Fatalism is a disease 
 of the Mystic Sense which substitutes ac- 
 quiescence for reaction. It is the straw 
 committing itself to the river, not the oars- 
 man using the current to his own advan- 
 tage. Acquiescence is too tame a virtue 
 for man, if indeed it be a virtue at all. 
 
 Whatever credit we give to heredity 
 for endowing us with the tendencies of our 
 evil forbears, we must give it equal credit 
 for endowing us with those of our good 
 forbears. If you are determined to be 
 fatalistic, be so fairly, recognizing the pos- 
 sible transmission of every kind of ten- 
 dency. Conscious acceptance of gifts of 
 
The Sixth Sense 79 
 
 strength from the past is a powerful coun- 
 ter-irritant to defend us against a real or 
 imagined inheritance of weakness. 
 
 The problem of heredity is obscured by 
 the fog of controversy which just now 
 envelopes it. We must remember that the 
 main questions in doubt are its method, 
 and extent, and our ability to intervene so 
 as to modify or improve its operations. 
 Science very cautiously says that " heredity 
 suggests, though it would be rash to say 
 it is proved, that man is almost entirely 
 the product of inborn factors which are 
 hardly affected by [physical] environ- 
 ment." * " Given parents of certain con- 
 stitution, it can be said with confidence 
 that on the average a certain proportion 
 of their offspring will have such and such 
 characters." " Both [the Biometrician 
 and Mendelian] agree that what is pres- 
 ent in the germ-cell will be present in the 
 individual, and that external conditions as 
 a rule play but a small part in determin- 
 ing its appearance." " Almost entirely," 
 11 hardly affected," " on the average," " a 
 certain proportion," " as a rule," form a 
 relatively large group of qualifying clauses 
 
 1 Doncaster , s Heredity in the Light of Recent Re- 
 search (1910), p. 113 ff. 
 
80 The Sixth Sense 
 
 in three short sentences. When we know 
 more certainly the mechanism by which 
 heredity operates we shall be better able 
 by eugenics and physiological or mechan- 
 ical processes to combat its evils and foster 
 its benefits. In the meantime there is no 
 call for us to stand idle. If man were 
 mere animal it would be another matter, 
 but he is not. His Mystic Sense, which 
 links him to a superior order, has steadily 
 differentiated him from all below him. It 
 has enabled him to transcend environment. 
 By means of it he can acquire character 
 even if the laws of transmission should 
 forbid him to pass it on to his offspring 
 by congenital endowment. It is a finer 
 and stronger thing to improve steadily the 
 tradition of family or race by a series of 
 successive personal conquests and achieve- 
 ments than to gain exemption from evil 
 tendencies by the more or less mechanical 
 process of procreation. Release from 
 temptation is not necessarily a benefit, and 
 is never as productive of character as the 
 gift of ability to defeat it. Frequently 
 all that is needed is inspiration, mystical 
 and human, to enable a man to rise above 
 his evil inheritance and habit. Evil tra- 
 dition is as real and destructive a phase of 
 
The Sixth Sense 81 
 
 heredity as inborn weakness, whereas on 
 the other hand noblesse oblige. It is 
 rather the tradition of the family trait of 
 intemperance than a transmitted physical 
 peculiarity that keeps the line of drunkards 
 unbroken. Children must not be allowed 
 to suppose that they can be excused from 
 struggle. Being prepared for all tempta- 
 tions as a normal part of experience they 
 are least likely to become victims of any: 
 being made expectant of all virtues, they 
 may perchance glean some. 
 
 Our environment is our opportunity, 
 particularly in those spots where it is un- 
 congenial and threatening. To chafe and 
 fret is to increase the inimical possibilities 
 of difficulty. To think of it except with 
 the intention of mastering it is weakening 
 and depressing. To remove it with our 
 own hands rather than have another re- 
 move it, if it be moveable, or, should it be 
 immoveable, to weave it as material into 
 our scheme of life, using its rough threads 
 to the last stand, is to achieve character. 
 A man must either fit his burden to his 
 back or his back to his burden, if he de- 
 sires to remain man. They are rare ex- 
 ceptions in mankind who have not capacity 
 for so doing, if not by themselves, at any 
 
Sz The Sixth Sense 
 
 rate in a sympathetic social setting. A 
 burdened life by the free use of the Mystic 
 Sense may become a privileged life. In- 
 troduce fearlessness and experimental curi- 
 osity into hardship, and you get romance 
 which keeps the wings of life moving and 
 mounting, and makes the world of men 
 around look up in aspiring wonder. 
 
 "There is no storme but this 
 Of your owne Cowardise 
 
 That braves you out; 
 You are the storme that mocks 
 Your selves; you are the rocks 
 
 Of your owne doubt: 
 Besides this feare of danger, ther's no 
 
 danger here; 
 And he that here feares danger, does de- 
 serve his feare." 1 
 
 The Mystic Sense has an inner ear. 
 Through it conscience delivers its message 
 by means of which we come to know and 
 understand the meaning of ought and 
 ought not. Ready response to conscience 
 is to be coveted above all things, especially 
 where conscience has been trained and 
 illumined. A friend once wrote me, a few 
 days before his death, that he had come 
 to see that what pretended to be education 
 
 1 Crashaw. 
 
The Sixth Sense 83 
 
 was no education at all unless it included 
 the development of conscience. But mere 
 knowledge of right and wrong, ought and 
 ought not, does not impart goodness. To 
 be aware that vice injures and virtue 
 blesses is desirable but insufficient. There 
 is not less vice among those who know 
 than there is among those who do not 
 know ethics, other things being equal, ex- 
 cepting where education is conceived to 
 be something more than the imparting of 
 information. 
 
 Sometimes nations and individuals covet 
 character without being ready to pay the 
 whole price for it. They give admirable 
 facilities for the development of certain 
 phases of training essential to character, 
 but exclude that deciding factor which de- 
 termines whether or not they may be 
 woven into character. Influences from 
 other sources may come in to repair wil- 
 ful neglect, but, if not, the training goes 
 for nothing so far as character is con- 
 cerned. Public schools can never give 
 character its best opportunity without a 
 practical recognition of religion. Purely 
 secular education, the imparting of learn- 
 ing including the science of ethics, without 
 religion in church and home to supplement 
 
84 The Sixth Sense 
 
 it, is a doubtful blessing at best. The cur- 
 rent idea of secular education is not new. 
 During the French Revolution its leaders 
 mapped out what appeared to be a satis- 
 factory programme of instruction. It was 
 desired to have moral training, first with- 
 out religion or with the " Worship of 
 Reason," then with a minimum of reli- 
 gion. The priests were suffered to continue 
 as being at any rate moral policemen, but 
 Danton planned to supplant them by 0/- 
 ficiers de morale. All experiments were 
 of no avail. "La morale populaire 
 . cherche encore" it was pathet- 
 ically complained, " un point d'appui 
 solide" Then came freedom to worship, 
 and later the Concordat reintroduced the 
 old religious order, partially, it is true, be- 
 cause the people could or would not live 
 without it, but largely for the sake of 
 morals. 
 
 If religion without morality becomes 
 superstitious sentiment, morality without 
 religion becomes for the average man in- 
 operative ethics and ultimately a pitiless 
 judge. There is no more oppressive ty- 
 rant than a high ethical code with a will, 
 untrained, uninspired, and helpless to re- 
 spond. It becomes a mocking and cruel 
 
(The Sixth Sense 85 
 
 Nemesis viewing with indifference its 
 writhing victims. The Chinese Classics 
 are preserved by the wonderful nation who 
 produced them, as a literary treasure in- 
 stead of as a practical code of conduct — 
 the sure fate of the Bible apart from the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 It is too late in the day to pretend that 
 morality and religion are synonymous, 
 however intimate their relationship, or that 
 the end of religion is to make men good. 
 Righteousness, which is the Christian term 
 for morality, is to be had only in part by 
 the practice of embracing the excellent and 
 bathing our mystic self in the fountain of 
 ideals. The type of righteousness thus 
 created can never be aught than self-con- 
 scious, like an overdressed woman, or a 
 gaudy painting. The Mystic Sense must 
 occupy itself in still higher altitudes. 
 Having come from God and being partaker 
 of His nature, it must aspire to Him. 
 The end of life is religion, and the end 
 of religion is to know God. The pur- 
 est type of righteousness, experienced 
 or conceivable, is created by our having as 
 our dominant ambition to know the only 
 God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. 
 The net result is Christian Character. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 IN RELATION TO RELIGION 
 
 The operation of the Mystic Sense in re- 
 lation to religion is commonly called faith , 
 Conversely, faith under another name is 
 that operation of the Mystic Sense which 
 promotes health of body, which affords a 
 starting point for all intellectual, scientific, 
 and other productive pursuits, which leads 
 character from strength to strength. The 
 subjective conditions under which, and the 
 spheres in which, the Mystic Sense is em- 
 ployed, differ. But the faculty itself and 
 its modus operandi are always the same. 
 Just as the sense of bodily sight which 
 views the dirt beneath our feet is the same 
 sense which contemplates the blue sky, so 
 the inner sense of sight which perceives 
 an electron, an ideal, or a hypothesis is the 
 same sense which sees God. It is as possi- 
 ble to see God as to see a hypothesis, and 
 as possible (not more and probably less), 
 to see a hypothesis as to see God. 1 
 
 1 A hypothesis receives passively our quest : God 
 moves to meet us. 
 
 86 
 
The Sixth Sense 87 
 
 It is fitting that the most exalted opera- 
 tion of the Mystic Sense should be dignified 
 by a distinctive term, provided that in so 
 doing no room is given for the implication 
 that there is a faculty, or set of faculties, 
 used in religion alone. A man has reli- 
 gious capacity because he is man, and not 
 because he is a specially favored individual 
 of his kind. Man, unless he abdicates 
 his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge 
 on the impossible, must live by his Mystic 
 Sense; he must keep touch with the un- 
 seen, or cease to be a man. To be a man, 
 rounded and proportioned, complete and 
 splendid, he must use his Mystic Sense not 
 merely here and there but everywhere. 
 The Mystic Sense has as true an existence 
 in the whole personality, and relation to it, 
 as the physical sense of touch, and is as 
 acutely sensitive to the stimulus of the 
 spiritual phase of reality as the body is to 
 that of the material. It is analogous to 
 all the sub-divisions of the nervous system 
 but chiefly to sight and hearing, the most 
 distinguished of the senses. 1 
 
 To perceive an ideal is as real a sensa- 
 tion as to look at a flower. An impression 
 
 1 Newman in his Dream of Gerontius endows the 
 disembodied soul with perceptive powers analogous 
 
88 The Sixth Sense 
 
 is left behind not unlike the photograph of 
 the flower retained on the retina of the 
 eye and revived by act of memory and 
 will. But the visualizing has nothing to 
 
 to those of the body, saving only the sense of sight. 
 Thus: 
 
 SouL "I cannot of thy music rightly say 
 
 Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones." 
 
 . . . " How comes it then 
 
 That I am hearing still, and taste, and 
 
 touch, 
 Yet not a glimmer of that princely sense 
 Which binds ideas in one, and makes them 
 
 live?" 
 Angel. "Nor touch nor taste, nor hearing hast thou 
 
 now; 
 Thou livest in a world of signs and types, 
 The presentation of most holy truths, 
 Living and strong, which now encompass 
 
 thee. 
 A disembodied soul, thou hast by right 
 No converse with aught beside thyself; 
 But, lest so stern a solitude should load 
 And break thy being, in mercy are vouch- 
 safed 
 Some lower measures of perception, 
 Which seem to thee, as though through 
 
 channels brought, 
 Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which 
 
 are gone. 
 
 How, even now, the consummated Saints 
 See God in heaven, I may not explicate; 
 Meanwhile, let it suffice thee to possess 
 Such means of converse as are granted thee, 
 Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art 
 blind." 
 
 The idea underlying the Beatific Vision is the com- 
 plete apprehension of God by the complete man. 
 
The Sixth Sense 89 
 
 do with physical sense perception, and the 
 part of the personality thus impressed is 
 spiritual. To characterize tactual sensa- 
 tion of the body as real necessitates a like 
 characterization of the tactual sensation of 
 the spirit. If it be argued that in the 
 latter relationship there is no certainty as 
 to what is phantasm and what reality, let 
 it be remembered that the history of sci- 
 ence is largely a series of corrections of 
 imperfect sense records. A highly devel- 
 oped power of observation with ability for 
 
 Sight is chosen to denote this bliss because it is a 
 princely co-ordinating sense, and our Lord spoke of 
 the heritage of the pure in heart as being the vision 
 of God, a heritage let it be noted, however, for now 
 and not merely for hereafter. It seems reasonable to 
 suppose that our powers of perception after death will 
 be those mystic powers which we enjoy and use now, 
 though then they will be rapidly developed as being 
 our only perceptive powers. 
 
 This suggests the investigation in progress of 
 psychic phenomena by scientific methods. The re- 
 sult may lead to an increase of our knowledge re- 
 garding the nature of such phenomena. But I do not 
 see how, if communication with the departed be pos- 
 sible at all, we can expect to reach, and be reached 
 by, them except through the Mystic Sense. The in- 
 vocation of Saints seems to me more in line with 
 what is probable than some of the experiments of the 
 day. Disembodied spirits presumably approximate 
 the nature of God and can approach or be ap- 
 proached only after a purely spiritual or mystical 
 fashion, excepting in those rare psycho-physical in- 
 stances which are themselves contingent upon a 
 highly developed mystical character and experience. 
 
90 The Sixth Sense 
 
 accurate registration and correlation is the 
 distinguishing feature of culture. The 
 Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, is ca- 
 pable of increasingly accurate perception 
 by skilful and disciplined use. It takes 
 its beginnings in gropings like the awk- 
 ward jerks of a baby's limbs, and develops 
 into ordered and reliable movement by 
 exercise and experiment, which includes mis- 
 takes and the profit accruing to the experi- 
 ence. Superstition bears the same relation 
 to faith that a false scientific hypoth- 
 esis bears to ascertained fact. The Mys- 
 tic Sense in its infant working catches a 
 distorted view of the ideal, as when Dar- 
 win propounded his conception of heredity 
 by pangenesis, and leads us astray in 
 science; in like manner in religion a 
 glimpse, through a mist of ignorance and 
 moral deficiency, of the Absolute, eventu- 
 ates in superstition. Both are necessary 
 stages in the training of the Mystic Sense. 
 Similarly to the way in which the theory 
 of pangenesis stimulated discussion and 
 research so as to aid the Mystic Sense to a 
 more accurate perception of the true hy- 
 pothesis of the manner of heredity, the 
 superstitions of the nations conceived in 
 sincerity, crude and even repulsive though 
 
The Sixth Sense 91 
 
 they be, have contributed to the complete 
 knowledge of God and His character 
 which forms our most valuable heritage. 
 
 It is not hazardous to say that the ideals 
 and hypotheses which are still waiting for 
 the cognition of the Mystic Sense transcend 
 gloriously those thus far apprehended. 
 This means that science is in its infancy. 
 It is equally true to assert that religion, 
 so far from having fallen into decline, is 
 but girding itself to scale heights impatient 
 to feel the tread of human feet. That 
 which is good and true in itself must per- 
 sist, whatever its crudeness and blemishes. 
 The Mystic Sense in relation to religion 
 is only at the beginning of its history. 
 Human, that is mystic, life began at so re- 
 mote a period as to be beyond the reach 
 of research. The operation of the Mystic 
 Sense through many thousands of years * 
 prior to human records led the way to that 
 ordered approach to God which we call 
 religion. The possibilities of its growth 
 for the race at large are indicated and em- 
 phasized by individual instances taken from 
 the common crowd. The world is just at 
 this moment engrossed in seeing that every 
 
 1 Progressive civilization may be said to have be- 
 gun 8,000 B. C. 
 
92 The Sixth Sense 
 
 one should have an opportunity of develop- 
 ing fine physique and of acquiring informa- 
 tion. It is assumed that under proper 
 conditions a high average may be reached. 
 The same is to be postulated for the devel- 
 opment of the Mystic Sense in relation to 
 the highest and best in religion. Under a 
 sufficient stimulus the average man will be 
 able to apprehend what now is reached 
 only by a minority. This, however, can 
 not come to pass until a whole world of 
 men strain their inner eye and quicken 
 their inner ear in the same direction, each 
 contributing of his own strength to the rest, 
 and all to each. 
 
 The history of Christianity and its im- 
 mediate progenitor, Judaism, is the record 
 of the highest development of the Mystic 
 Sense in religion. In the course of its 
 progress the Absolute rises from a dim 
 shadow to the greatest Reality. It is dis- 
 tinctively the religion of orderly and ra- 
 tional mysticism. At first, men, feeling 
 the working of the Mystic Sense, used it in 
 a childish way. What was splendid in 
 them would be culpable in us. Abraham 
 could consider it a call of God to slay his 
 son : a man of to-day could only think of it 
 as a monstrous crime against God and so- 
 
The Sixth Sense 93 
 
 ciety, revolting even to contemplate. It 
 marked a stage in the rationalizing of faith 
 when at the last moment Abraham saw 
 mystically that it was not God's purpose 
 that any human being should ever do at 
 His bidding an inhuman deed. 
 
 The most perfect individual life of faith 
 ever lived was that of Jesus Christ. His 
 Mystic Sense never erred. He was never 
 so exclusively Divine as not to be com- 
 pletely human. He was God living the 
 life of man. He walked by faith, not by 
 sight. Visions and ecstasies found rare 
 and momentary place in His experience. 
 He reached His goal by the use of those 
 gifts and endowments which we have in 
 common with Him, and proclaimed for- 
 ever to the race of men that it is the sim- 
 ple, steady, patient exercise of the Mystic 
 Sense toward a God who is revealed as 
 Love, which exalts human life and puts it 
 in the way of winning incomparable power 
 and beauty. His reply to the query, What 
 shall we do, that we might work the works 
 of God, is, This is the work of God, that 
 ye believe — believe on Him whom He 
 hath sent. Further, He makes the as- 
 tounding prophecy, Assuredly I announce 
 that he that believeth on me, the works 
 
94 The Sixth Sense 
 
 that I do shall he do also; and greater 
 works than these shall he do. The early 
 Christians were distinguished from their 
 fellows as men who exhibited in high de- 
 gree the faculty of belief so as to be in a 
 unique sense " Believers," and their re- 
 ligion was one in which faith played so 
 prominent a part as to merit the name of 
 " The Faith." The whole Christian era 
 has been an era of faith or the exercise of 
 the Mystic Sense. No great work can be 
 found in it, in science, literature or religion 
 which has not been made possible by the 
 stimulus given to faith by the influence of 
 Jesus. Miracles do not cease to be mirac- 
 ulous when they cease to be mysterious, and 
 the Christian centuries are strewn with such 
 miracles — many of them, works of heal- 
 ing and moral restoration, as great as those 
 of Jesus. But the greater works than His 
 still lie before us when we have sufficiently 
 shed materialism and committed ourselves 
 more implicitly to the life of faith. 1 
 
 x Two things must be remembered in connection 
 with the interpretation of Jno. xiv ff. In the first 
 place, these chapters, bursting as they are with 
 startling promises which the critic claims have not 
 been made good, were addressed to a select and 
 specially trained group of followers. For instance, 
 Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, 
 constitutes a promise that could not have been made 
 
The Sixth Sense 95 
 
 The disappearance into the spirit world 
 of Jesus has made that world human, 1 so 
 that the Mystic Sense can be as truly at 
 home in it as it is in scientific research. 
 He prepared for His withdrawal thither 
 by centring the attention of His friends 
 upon it. His manifestations after His 
 death on the cross were primarily to the 
 Mystic Sense of His followers. That is 
 to say, those unaccustomed to use the Mys- 
 tic Sense in a religious way were incapable 
 of seeing Him. It was impossible for 
 Him to show Himself to the irreligious or 
 enemies of God. This does not mean that 
 
 to a heterogeneous crowd. It presupposes an under- 
 standing of the mind of Christ that keeps prayer 
 within its appointed limits. A promise of this sort 
 made to a St. John would be fulfilled, whereas it 
 could not be fulfilled in the case of a man who 
 thought that a prayer for the success of his lottery 
 ticket, or the triumph of a competitive business scheme 
 stained with dishonor, might be offered in the name 
 of Jesus. In the second place, these chapters were 
 written down and became accepted Scripture not 
 less than three quarters of a century after they were 
 spoken, by one who, in common with like-minded 
 companions, had experienced the faithfulness of our 
 Lord's promises. These men knew them to be true, 
 not merely because our Lord had said them, but also 
 because Christian experience, had verified them. This 
 is so of the entire Gospel record. # That was remem- 
 bered and recorded which Christian experience had 
 verified. 
 
 1 Similarly His advent into our human world made 
 it Divine. 
 
96 The Sixth Sense 
 
 it was only to the Mystic Sense of believers 
 that He manifested Himself, but also to 
 their bodily senses by way of the Mystic 
 Sense. There is much that comes to the 
 cognizance of the Mystic Sense through 
 physical perception, and unless there is a 
 refined and cultured nervous organism 
 there is no mystical connotation. A Peter 
 Bell could not find the mystical in nature. 
 
 "A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 The same primrose to a Linnaeus or an 
 Asa Gray would reveal an unseen world. 
 Conversely, there are some things which 
 cannot affect our physical being except by 
 the way of mystical experience. Striking 
 instances of this sort have been suitably 
 termed by von Hiigel " psycho-physical." 
 They are possible only where there is ex- 
 traordinary sympathy between the mystical 
 and physical, the latter having been made 
 very completely the servant of the former. 
 Only the mystic, or the specialist in the 
 use of the Mystic Sense, is eligible for such 
 experiences. The tremendously real fel- 
 lowship with the Risen Lord of the dis- 
 ciples was of an ecstatic or psycho-physical 
 
The Sixth Sense 97 
 
 order. It degrades the Resurrection man- 
 ifestations to overemphasize their physical 
 reality as though this, rather than the 
 mystical, were the important feature. 
 Their dominant note is spiritual. The 
 physical perception came through the mys- 
 tical. The experience of the disciples 
 could not be reproduced in after times with 
 other men, for the necessary conditions 
 were wanting. Here and there among 
 spiritual giants there is a well authenticated 
 psycho-physical experience, but it is of 
 phenomenal rather than of spiritual or- 
 moral value. And yet it is within our 
 power to see the Christ as really and ef- 
 fectively as the Apostles did, though not 
 wholly after the same manner. 
 
 St. Paul did not begin his life of faith 
 when he had his psycho-physical experience 
 ori the road to Damascus. He reached 
 there a turning point in its history. He 
 was converted, turning his mystic powers 
 in a new direction. Those who were with 
 him were not sufficiently developed to see 
 all that he saw or hear all that he heard. 1 
 His vision of Jesus was momentary but 
 his life of faith was continuous. If faith 
 was at its beginning when Abraham made 
 
 1 Acts ix, 7; xxii, 9. 
 
98 The Sixth Sense 
 
 his venture, it reached an illustrative and 
 inviting climax when St. Paul made his. 
 It was greater for St. Paul to espouse the 
 cause of the Christ than to have a vision 
 of Jesus. The phenomenal or extraordi- 
 nary does not always culminate in such 
 courage and devotion as his. It was be- 
 cause he was a mystic that he had his vision, 
 not because he had a vision that he became 
 a mystic. The Apostles who knew Jesus 
 in the flesh had a lesser opportunity for 
 faith than St. Paul who saw Him but once 
 and then after psycho-physical fashion, and 
 who never apprehended Him with all his 
 bodily senses like those who saw " with 
 their eyes " and " beheld," and whose 
 " hands handled " the Word of Life. It 
 was fitting that St. Paul should give Chris- 
 tianity the impetus which made it a world 
 religion. The highest development of 
 faith has assigned to it the biggest under- 
 taking. St. Peter with undeveloped intel- 
 lectual gifts and faith based on sight could 
 not do what St. Paul with highly developed 
 reason and singular faith could do. The 
 Risen Jesus Himself declared that faith 
 dependent upon physical or psycho-physical 
 experience is of a lower order than that in 
 which the mystic sense is independent of 
 
The Sixth Sense 99 
 
 phenomenal action of the bodily sense — 
 Because thou hast seen me, thou hast be- 
 lieved: blessed are they that have not seen, 
 and yet have believed. 
 
 The great multitude of mortals will al- 
 ways be outside of psycho-physical expe- 
 riences. There is no religious loss in the 
 fact. Rather the contrary. That which 
 gives the soul its permanent hold upon 
 moral and spiritual realities and regard for 
 them in mystics is not their rare psycho- 
 physical experiences, but the same exercise 
 of the Mystic Sense in the daily round of 
 commonplace religious duty which is open 
 to every human being, with like wonderful 
 results upon character. A phenomenal 
 spiritual occurrence in the case of one who 
 was not living a religious life would be a 
 mere wonder, perhaps even productive of 
 spiritual harm. 1 Such experiences are 
 never to be sought for. If they come 
 their peril is not less than their inspiration. 
 
 "The trivial round, the common task, 
 Will furnish all we need to ask, 
 Room to deny ourselves, a road 
 To bring us daily nearer God." 
 
 1 The miracles of Moses before Pharaoh are illus- 
 trative of that which abounds in history — wonders 
 hardening further an irreligious life. 
 
ioo The Sixth Sense 
 
 It is a great barrier to religious effort 
 among the crowd, for those living the life 
 of faith, to give the impression that their 
 experience is one of a series of ecstasies. 
 It is no more so than is that of a student 
 of science or higher mathematics. It is 
 the life of faith open to all men which 
 forms the religious life of the best men 
 and the best religious life of all men — 
 the constant placing of God before the 
 Mystic Sense in a way not dissimilar from 
 that in which the scientist approaches his 
 hypothesis. 
 
 "Think not the Faith by which the just shall live 
 Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven, 
 Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, 
 A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given; 
 It is an affirmation and an act 
 That bids eternal truth be present fact." 
 
 Though the Mystic Sense is not the sole 
 religious faculty, it holds the primacy here 
 as in every distinctively human activity. 
 Used with reason its operation becomes 
 reasonable or rational faith. Its opposite 
 is not reason but sight, that is to say, the 
 unaided findings of the bodily senses of 
 which sight, being the most princely, is 
 representative. Hence St. Paul's con- 
 
The Sixth Sense 101 
 
 trast — we walk by faith, not by sight 
 Even here it is hardly fair to say there is 
 antagonism. Sight is the enemy of faith 
 only when it refuses to be an ally. Sight 
 sees, faith in-sees and therefore fore- 
 sees. Sight has boundaries which it can- 
 not pass. Faith has horizons which re- 
 treat as it advances. 
 
 Faith has become increasingly rational 
 as the world has grown older and experi- 
 ence has been added to experience. Its 
 explorations in the world of ideals have 
 been more frequent and daring with the 
 advance of time. Consequently the man 
 of to-day makes his flights thitherwards 
 with a fulness of assurance on rational 
 grounds or grounds of high probability 
 which would have been impossible to an 
 Abraham. If the triumphs open to faith 
 have mutiplied, so have the deterrent forces 
 holding it back or set in battle array to 
 thwart or otherwise impair it. The com- 
 monest injury wrought upon faith is the 
 deflecting of it from the worthy to the 
 unworthy or less worthy. If a man's 
 Mystic Sense, acute in other directions, is 
 dormant or sluggish in religion, the reason 
 is usually to be found, I think, in circum- 
 stances analogous to those which make a 
 
102 The Sixth Sense 
 
 student of belles lettres, for instance, in- 
 different to science, or a philosopher care- 
 less of the exploits of commerce, cases of 
 which are not wanting. The mind finds 
 higher pleasure among certain persons in 
 being exclusive and technical than in being 
 catholic. So the Mystic Sense can fall 
 short of its highest employment simply be- 
 cause there is not in its possessor the will 
 to employ it commensurately with its ca- 
 pacity. The explanation why some men 
 are not actively religious must be sought 
 elsewhere than in the contention that they 
 are short a faculty. The Mystic Sense, 
 which by virtue of their humanity they 
 possess, is not employed by them reli- 
 giously from whatever reason — defective 
 interest, prejudice, antagonism, environ- 
 ment. Nevertheless the same inner sense 
 is pushed to its fullest activity in other 
 directions. The faculty which by a daring 
 leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, 
 or with imaginative subtlety suggests the 
 plot of a novel, is the selfsame one which 
 enables us to say, " Our Father, which art 
 in heaven." The consideration of vicious 
 men who are irreligious does not come 
 within the purview of this discussion. Re- 
 ligion and vice are mutually exclusive, 
 
The Sixth Sense 103 
 
 though piety and immorality are not, so 
 that we have the anomaly of immoral char- 
 acter revelling in pious practices. 
 
 One thing remains to be said. The use 
 of the Mystic Sense in religion, more per- 
 haps than in any other sphere, cannot be- 
 gin and end in individualism. It is 
 requisite for each to submit the results 
 of his mystic excursions and explorations 
 to the conclusions of the most advanced 
 religion. Mystic observation and experi- 
 ence must have the support and purifica- 
 tion of universal mystic experience that 
 will distinguish between the false and the 
 true, phantasm and reality, and deliver 
 the individual from eccentricity and ex- 
 travagance. In other words, a church is 
 more necessary than a chamber of com- 
 merce, a national government, or an acad- 
 emy of science. Mystic experience must 
 be organized like all other experience. 
 As the world grows older and man wiser, 
 organization develops and broadens. Na- 
 tional societies and alliances become inter- 
 national and a parliament of man seems 
 a reasonable goal toward which to press. 
 Human life in its individual aspect finds its 
 fullest freedom in organization and not 
 agart from it. The idea of the Catholic 
 
104 The Sixth Sense 
 
 Church is as old as Christianity. One 
 Body, one spirit, one Lord, one Faith, 
 one Baptism, said St. Paul before Chris- 
 tianity was fifty years old — and the use 
 of the Mystic Sense independently of or- 
 ganized Christian experience cannot hope 
 to reach valuable results. Reformers of 
 religion are eccentrics and detract from 
 their service so far as they ignore the re- 
 ligious experience of the ages by assuming 
 exclusive positions or lifting a doctrine 
 out of its setting. Our Lord never broke 
 with the faith of His fathers. His last 
 act was to partake of the Passover accord- 
 ing to the law. It was the Jews who 
 broke with Him. He came not to destroy 
 but to fulfill. The only setting for any 
 one part of the truth is all the rest of the 
 truth. The only relationship big enough 
 for any one man is all the rest of man- 
 kind. When at last the disturbed and 
 broken Christian Church comes to rest in 
 the large scheme of unity planned by its 
 Founder, then the mystical life of man 
 will gain a power and splendor which now 
 is but a vision and a hope. 
 
 This concludes my endeavor to credit 
 the Mystic Sense with that dignity and 
 
The Sixth Sense 105 
 
 position of importance which belongs to 
 it by right. The attempt is crude and the 
 brilliant vision which I had at the begin- 
 ning of my task has become dimmer under 
 the process of putting it into words. 
 Whatever has been written stands as a 
 contribution of thought and experience 
 which cannot be of much value until it has 
 been purified from the dross of individual- 
 ism through the findings of religion and 
 science, and lost in the great volume of 
 truth to which I submit it with reverence 
 and loyalty. 
 
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