326 CRITICAL STUDIES way for it." And this ; " Hence, writing from an influx which is really out of your Self, or so within your Self so as to amount to the same thing [this pregnant identical alternative is very noteworthy], is either a religion or a madness. I know of no third possibility. [The ancients, we shall see, did ; they re- cognised it as both a religion and a madness, a sacred frenzy; and moderns, Christian and non-Christian, have thus recognised it also.] * In allowing your faculties to be directed to ends they know not of, there is only One Being to whom you dare entrust them — only the Lord." Now, what does all this mean other than the re-assertion of the fundamental principle of all mysticism, in all times and climes? — from the most ancient Indian gymnosophists to the Hebrew prophets and poets, to Christian apostles, as Paul and John, to Plato and Plotinus, to Mohammed and the Sufis, to early and mediaeval Christian eremites and saints with their trances and ecstasies, to George Fox and his Quakers, walking by the interior light and waiting to be moved by the Spirit, to Behmen and Law, to Swedenborg and Blake, to Shelley with his opening of " Alastor," his " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," his "Defence of Poetry," his "Ode to
- As Dr. Wilkinson was, of course, well aware, long before he
wrote the " Improvisations." Thus, in his " Emanuel Swedenborg : A Biography" (1849), he writes, p. 234 : " Swedenborg's case may be studied like any other ol>ject of science. . . . Nay, were it sure that he was stark mad, it would not dispossess us of one truth or vision in his writings ; these would survive the grave of his personal reputation, and bring us Ixick to the ancient faith, that madness too has a Divine side, and in its natural heedlessness, sparkles with wisdom and prophecy, or even sometimes is interpolated with the directer oracles of God."
