o eye opposed,
Salutes each other with each other's form:
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travelled, and is mirrored there,
Where it may see itself."


Nature is dumb, and our own hearts are dumb, until they are allowed to
speak to each other. Then both will speak to us of God.

Speculative Mysticism has occupied itself largely with these two great
subjects--the immanence of God in nature, and the relation of human
personality to Divine. A few words must be said, before I conclude, on
both these matters.

The Unity of all existence is a fundamental doctrine of Mysticism. God
is in all, and all is in God. "His centre is everywhere, and His
circumference nowhere," as St. Bonaventura puts it. It is often argued
that this doctrine leads direct to Pantheism, and that speculative
Mysticism is always and necessarily pantheistic. This is, of course,
a question of primary importance. It is in the hope of dealing with it
adequately that I have selected three writers who have been frequently
called pantheists, for discussion in these Lectures. I mean Dionysius
the Areopagite, Scotus Erigena, and Eckhart. But it would be
impossible even to indicate my line of argument in the few minutes
left me this morning.

The mystics are much inclined to adopt, in a modified form, the old
notion of an _anima mundi_. When Erigena says, "Be well assured that
the Word--the second Person of the Trinity--is the Nature of all
things," he means that the Logos is a cosmic principle, the
Personality of which the universe is the external expression or
appearance.[47]

We are not now concerned with cosmological speculations, but the
bearing of this theory on human personality is obvious. If the Son of
God is regarded as an all-embracing and all-pervading cosmic
principle, the "mystic union" of the believer with Christ becomes
something much closer than an ethical harmony of two mutually
exclusive wills. The question which exercises the mystics is not
whether such a thing as fusion of