977. It is hardly a paradox to say that the evidence for ecstasy is stronger than the evidence for any other religious belief. Of all the subjective experiences of religion, ecstasy is that which has been most urgently, perhaps to the psychologist most convincingly, asserted; and it is not confined to any one religion. From a psychological point of view, one main indication of the importance of a subjective phenomenon found in religious experience will be the fact that it is common to all religions. I doubt whether there is any phenomenon, except ecstasy, of which this can be said. From the medicine-man of the lowest savages up to St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, with Buddha and Mahomet on the way, we find records which, though morally and intellectually much differing, are in psychological essence the same.

At all stages alike we find that the spirit is conceived as quitting the body; or, if not quitting it, at least as greatly expanding its range of perception in some state resembling trance. Observe, moreover, that on this view all genuine recorded forms of ecstasy are akin, and all of them represent a real fact.

We thus show continuity and reality among phenomena which have seldom been either correlated with each other or even intelligibly conceived in separation. With our new insight we may correlate the highest and the lowest ecstatic phenomena with no injury whatever to the highest. The shaman, the medicine-man - when he is not a mere impostor - enters as truly into the spiritual world as St. Peter or St. Paul. Only he enters a different region thereof; a confused and darkened picture terrifies instead of exalting him. For us, however, the very fact that we believe in his vision gives a new reality to strengthen and aid our belief in the apostle's vision of "the seventh heaven".

"Whether in the body or out of the body," whether the seer's spirit be severed for the time from his organism or no, such inlet and intro-gression does occur.

It is these subjective feelings of vision or inspiration which have to many men formed the most impressive and fruitful moments of life. While not allowing an objective truth to their revelations, we shall now be prepared to admit a reality in the subjective experience. There is no special point at which we must assume a barrier interposed to the inward withdrawal and onward urgency of man.

We need not deny the transcendental ecstasy to any of the strong souls who have claimed to feel it; - to Elijah or to Isaiah, to Plato or to Plotinus, to St. John or to St. Paul, to Buddha or Mahomet, to Virgil or Dante, to St. Theresa or to Joan of Arc, to Kant or to Swedenborg, to Wordsworth or to Tennyson. Through many ages that insight and that memory have wrought their work in many ways. The remembrance of ecstasy has inspired religions, has founded philosophies, has lifted into stainless heroism a simple girl. Yet religions and philosophies - as these have hitherto been known - are but balloon-flights which have carried separate groups up to the mountain summit, whither science at last must make her road for all men clear. It is by breach of continuity, by passing from one element to another, that they have been able to soar so high. For science, on the other hand, the continuity of the Universe is in fact its key. The task of our race in its maturity must be to rise to those same heights with that steady tramp as of legions along a Roman road which has already gathered in the earthly knowledge of earlier ages within the pomoerium of scientific law.

The continuity of the universe, that is to say, so far as by us comprehensible, must needs be a continuity of objective, and for that very reason of symbolic manifestation. All the objective is symbolic; our daily bread is as symbolic as the furniture of Swedenborg's heavens and hells. To our embodied souls the matter round us seems real and self-existent; to souls emancipated it is but the sign of the degree which we have reached, and thus the highest task of science must be to link and co-ordinate the symbols appropriate to our terrene state with the symbols appropriate to the state immediately above us. Nay, one might push this truth to paradox, and maintain that of all earth's inspired spirits it has been the least divinised, the least lovable, who has opened the surest path for men. Religions have risen and die again; philosophy, poetry, heroism, answer only indirectly the prime need of men. Plotinus, "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," is lost to sight in the heavens. Conquering and to conquer, the Maid rides on through other worlds than ours. Virgil himself, "light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this earthly shore," sustains our spirit, as I have said, but indirectly, by filling still our fountain of purest intellectual joy.

But the prosaic Swede, - his stiff mind prickly with dogma, - the opaque cell-walls of his intelligence flooded cloudily by the irradiant day, - this man as by the very limitations of his faculty, by the practical humility of a spirit trained to acquire but not to generate truth, - has awkwardly laid the corner-stone, grotesquely sketched the elevation of a temple which our remotest posterity will be upbuilding and adorning still. For he dimly felt that man's true passage and intuition from state to state depends not upon individual ecstasy, but upon comprehensive law; while yet all law is in fact but symbol; adaptation of truth timeless and infinite to intelligences of lower or higher range.