Nature Mysticism

hings in the universe. . . . The minds which have not attained to the Highest, and are a prey to natural beauties in the stage of Maya, will continually have to turn into various forms, from one to another, because nothing in the stage of Maya is stable." Nor would the Christian mystics allow of any intermediaries between the soul and God; they most of them held that the soul must rise above the things of sense, mount into another sphere, and be "alone with the Alone."

What, then, is the concept of the ultimately Real which these stricter mystics have evolved and are prepared to defend? It is that of pure and unconditioned Being--the One--the Absolute. By a ruthless process of abstraction they have abjured the world of sense to vow allegiance to a mode of being of which nothing can be said without denying it. For even to allow a shadow of finiteness in the Absolute is to negate it; to define it is to annihilate it! It swallows up all conditions and relations without becoming any more knowable; it embra