The Psychology of the Mystics

Joseph Maréchal, Algar Thorold

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780486148410
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mysticism

An early and influential volume among the 20th-century studies of mystic psychology, this landmark survey begins with an examination of empirical science and religious psychology. It discusses the sensation of presence in mystics and non-mystics, distinctive features of Christian mysticism, and criticisms of the legitimacy of the mystic experience.

ON THE FEELING OF PRESENCE IN MYSTICS AND NON-MYSTICS¹

SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION.

FIRST PART

DATA FURNISHED BY NORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

• I. FIRST PRECISE NOTIONS TO BE APPLIED TO THE CONSIDERATION OF THE PROBLEM. THE JUDGEMENT OF REALITY AND THE JUDGEMENT OF PRESENCE.
• II. THE JUDGEMENT OF REALITY IN SEVERAL “ GROUPS OF FACTS.”
  1. . True Hallucinations.
  2. . Pseudo-Hallucinations and Intermediate Cases.
  3. . Illusions of Perception.
• III. DISCUSSION OF THESE CASES.
  1. The Judgement of Reality is not, originally, a Conclusion, even an Implicit One.
  2. Nor is it the Immediate Result of a Structure of Representations.
  3. Negative Hallucinations and Feeling of Unreality.
  4. The Affective Connexions of the Judgement of Reality.
     1. Belief and interest.
     2. Belief and will.
     3. Insufficiency of phenomenalist empiricism.
     4. Participation of the life of the emotions in the affirmation of reality.
     5. Attention and belief.
  5. Difficulty of Co-Ordinating the Elements of the Problem if the “ Judgement of Reality ” is Secondary and Resultant.
• IV. INVERSION OF THE TERMS OF THE PROBLEM.
  1. Realism is Primary and cannot be Reduced to more Elementary Conditions.
  2. Rise of Doubt and of the Demand for a Synthesis of Representations and Affections.
  3. Secondary Modes of Emergence of the Judgement of Reality. The Whole Complex of Facts is Explained by One of the Fundamental Laws of the Human Mind.
• V. VIEW OF THE GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY OF INTUITION AND AFFIRMATION. DEEP REASON OF THE LAWS TO WHICH APPEAL IS MADE.

SECOND PART

APPLICATIONS TO MYSTICAL KNOWLEDGE

• I. THE ESSENTIAL AND ACCESSORY IN THE MYSTICAL STATES.
• II. INTERMEDIARIES BETWEEN ORDINARY KNOWLEDGE AND THE HIGHER MYSTICAL STATE. THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM.
  1. Sensible Visions.
  2. Imaginary Visions.
  3. Laws of the Hallucinatory Spatialisation of a Representation.Spatialised “ Intellectual “ Visions.
• III. INTUITION OF A TRANSCENDENT PRESENCE IN THE HIGHER MYSTICAL STATE. NATURE OF THIS INTUITION.
  1. The Problem.
  2. Mystical Intuition outside Catholicism.
     1. Neoplatonism.
     2. Yogism.
     3. Buddhism.
     4. Musulman mysticism. Sufism.
     5. Contemporary profane or pantheistic mysticism.
     6. Ecstasy of Contemporary Protestants.
  3. Mystical Intuition in the Great Orthodox Catholic Contemplatives. Its Descriptive Characters.
  4. Discussion.
     1. Preliminaries.
     2. Statement and criticism of certain opinions of psychologists.
     3. The Conditions of any legitimate explanatory hypothesis.
     4. Psychological legitimacy of a metempirical hypothesis which respects the letter of the mystical documents.

INTRODUCTION

IT is the purpose of this essay to set down a few reflections suggested by a problem on which psychologists have not as yet shed much light. The impression of the presence of an object is one of our most ordinary experiences. On close examination, however, it appears complicated with so many varying elements, and comes before our notice in such widely differing circumstances, that its analysis speedily becomes difficult, if not impossible. It is easy, therefore, to understand the puzzled and hesitating tone of a short note which William James² devotes to the specially baffling case where the quite clear feeling of a presence is found dissociated from any concomitant sense-impression. Cases of this kind are, as a matter of fact, by no means rare. James himself, a little later, in the course of his Gifford Lectures on Religious Experience,³ quotes a fairly long list of them from the special point of view with which he was then dealing.

The problem, in fact, has long been presented in all its urgency by every page of that richly diversified psychological repertory which lies in the archives of orthodox or heterodox mysticism. Now that these archives have become the object, even on the part of the most completely “ non-religious ” enquirers, of increasingly frequent and proportionally less superficial researches, the psychological riddles they conceal have begun one by one to come to light, and to excite a keen curiosity.

M. Henri Delacroix, in his Études sur l’histoire et la psychologie des grands mystiques chrétiens,⁴ has encountered in his turn the problem indicated by James. Though we cannot agree with all the conclusions of M. Delacroix., we are pleased to find in his new book that serious spirit of enquiry and that sympathy with criticism which are still the most indispensable conditions for a correct understanding of the questions approached. It is not, however, our intention here to undertake an examination of M. Delacroix’s work, nor even merely of the appendix thereto, entitled Sentiment de présence we shall limit ourselves in the following pages to grouping together certain elements which will enable our readers to consider in greater detail the problem presented by that work, and to place it rightly. And for ourselves—we will at once confess—it presents itself especially as a function of Catholic mysticism; it is our desire, from a preliminary examination of profane documents alone, to suggest solutions, possibly diverse in character, which will enable the laws and analogies of psychology to be accepted in a strictly mystical connection. But the reader will excuse us from claiming, any more than James or M. Delacroix, to “ provide a definitive solution of this little problem,”⁵ which, modest though it may seem, has none the less a close connection with several more profound questions.

FIRST PART

DATA FURNIS HED BY NORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

I. FIRST PRECISE NOTIONS TO BE APPLIED TO THE CONSIDERATION OF THE PROBLEM. THE JUDGEMENT OF REALITY AND THE JUDGEMENT OF PRESENCE

The feeling of presence is not wholly different in kind from that of reality. In fact, the character of reality which the immediate perception of an object carries with it is for us confused with the feeling of that object’s presence. To say, in the real meaning of the word, “ this sheet of paper is present to me,” is equivalent to saying “ it is actually accessible to my senses, I see it, I am touching it.” Later on we shall have to analyse all that this equivalence implies; for the moment we are content with stating the relationship between the two notions of presence and of immediately perceived reality.⁶

The ascertainment of this relationship will enable us to connect our own enquiries with preceding ones, and to make use of the results and hypotheses which have long been recorded in classical works on psychology.

Everyone instinctively grasps the difference between a direct sensation and a pure imaginative representation, the Wahrnehmung and the simple Vorstellung. Why does the one carry with it the note of reality, of actual presence, while the other, even though identical in content, lacks this character ? What is it, in short, which distinguishes “ this table ” which I see or am touching from “ this table ” which I imagine ?

Most modern psychologists reply, following Hume, that it is a “ persuasion,” a belief which invests the sensation of “ this table ” with its affirmation of reality, without also investing the pure representation therewith. In what, then, does this belief consist ? It is, says James Mill, wholly resolvable into association.⁷ It is primordial, and not susceptible of further analysis, John Stuart Mill maintains.⁸ These criteria, adds A. Bain, are too purely intellectual; a represented object manifests itself as real when it at once calls forth some exercise of our activity upon it; the belief in its reality is “ an incident of our intellectual constitution . . . not made up, in the first instance, by either activity or emotion, but is largely magnified by both.”⁹ “ In its inner nature,” writes W. James, “ belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else.”¹⁰

This belief, which distinguishes sensation from pure representation, is assimilated by James to the judgement of reality, the “ affirmation ” of Brentano ; “ every object,” says the latter, “ touches consciousness in two ways: as a simple representation, and as affected by affirmation or negation.”¹¹ By the mere fact of its presentation to the mind, the object raises the question of its reality, and calls for some mental attitude, a Yes, a No, or doubt. The “ Yes ” is the judgement of reality, the “ belief ” of James—perhaps it would be better to say that it is the translation of this affective belief into the intellectual field. But if the judgement of reality be founded immediately on a sense-perception, it will be at the same time a judgement of presence: “ I see this sheet of paper; it exists ; it is there.” And this judgement, once more, will be original and incapable of analysis.

It would, however, be rather too simple to distinguish a perception from a representation solely by the fact that the former is a representation accompanied by a belief, which is at the same time accompanied by an affirmation of reality. From the standpoint of pure description, we can distinguish several momentary steps in the process which ends in full perception of reality—steps indissolubly united and rendered possible the one by the other.¹²

We must remember that man, in whom the understanding collaborates with all the operations of consciousness, does not in his personal experience possess any “ sensation ” in the pure state; he may define in the abstract, but he does not experience in an isolated state that simple and direct touch of the sense-impression by itself, without a concept, without an intellectual synthesis to put it in its place, without a judgement to support it and set it as object over against the thinking subject, without “ reflection ” to relate it to the Ego. It therefore comes to pass that, as soon as we become conscious of our attitude towards the problem of a sensible object’s reality, the original and immediate contact of our knowing faculties with that object is already entangled in a complex set of co-ordinated operations; to which of these elements, which it is so difficult to separate from one another, is the decisive influence on our final affirmation of reality or unreality, subjectivity or objectivity, to be attributed ?

I see my pen running over my paper; it is there “ present ” to me, in the strictest sense. This apparently simple judgement presupposes a mass of elementary sensations, associated in a spatial synthesis, distinguished from other groupings, incorporated, so to speak, in their place in the flux of my psychological life, connected up with my possibilities...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• FOREWORD
• Table of Contents
• EMPIRICAL SCIENCE AND RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY - CRITICAL NOTES
• ON THE FEELING OF PRESENCE IN MYSTICS AND NON-MYSTICS
• SOME DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM
• PROFESSOR LEUBA AS A PSYCHOLOGIST OF MYSTICISM
• THE PROBLEM OF MYSTICAL GRACE IN ISLAM
• REFLECTIONS ON THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MYSTICISM