that a true mysticism is the flowering of the bud of knowledge; that
true knowledge constitutes a tributary which runs into the ocean of the
Infinite Love of the Divine and becomes the most precious possession of
the soul.[34]

Eucken touches on this subject in an extremely interesting chapter in
his _Truth of Religion_. "This is a question of fact, and not of
argument.... Because we convinced ourselves that things were so, we
gained the standpoint of spiritual experience over against a merely
psychological standpoint. For the [p.107] latter standpoint occupies
itself with purely psychic processes, and in the province of religion
especially it occupies itself with the conditions of the stimulations
of will and feeling, which are not able to prove anything beyond
themselves. The spiritual experience, on the contrary, has to do with
life's contents and with the construction of reality; it need not
trouble itself concerning the connections of the world except in a
subsidiary manner, because it stands in the midst of such connections,
and without these it cannot possibly exist. Man never succeeds in
reaching the Divine unless the Divine works and is acknowledged in his
own life; what is omitted here in the first step is never again
recovered and becomes more and more impossible as life proceeds on its
merely natural course. If, however, the standpoint of spiritual
experience is gained, then religion succeeds in attaining entire
certainty and immediacy; then the struggles in which it was involved
turn into a similar result, and its own inner movements become a
testimony to the reality of the new world which it represents."[35]


* * * * *