been softened with the continual droppings of religion, and their
spirits made timorous and apt for impression by the assiduity of
prayer, and the continual dyings of mortification--the fancy, which is
a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm, and in
a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in great
ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the burdens and
support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and call it what
they please." Henry More, too, says that those who would "make their
whole nature desolate of all animal figurations whatever," find only
"a waste, silent solitude, and one uniform parchedness and vacuity.
And yet, while a man fancies himself thus wholly Divine, he is not
aware how he is even then held down by his animal nature; and that it
is nothing but the stillness and fixedness of melancholy that thus
abuses him, instead of the true Divine principle."]

[Footnote 29: Plato, _Phaedrus_, 244, 245; Ion, 534.]

[Footnote 30: Lacordaire, _Conferences_, xxxvii.]

[Footnote 31: Compare, too, the vigorous words of Henry More, the most
mystical of the group: "He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and
cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of reason,
upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle (which, a
thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of melancholy, and a
superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use
his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some
supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of spectacles made of
the crystalline heaven, or of the _caelum empyreum_, to hang upon his
nose for him to look through."]

[Footnote 32: There is, of course, a sense in which any strong feeling
lifts us "above reason." But this is using "reason" in a loose
manner.]

[Footnote 33: [Greek: ho nous basileus], says Plotinus.]

[Footnote 34: Roman Catholic writers can assert that "la plupart des
contemplatifs etaient depourvus de toute c