The Mystic Sense has for its workshop the uplands of life in the rarefied atmosphere of ideas and ideals. It is at once a super-sense giving us a bird’s-eye view of the universe which is not permitted at close quarters, and a sub-sense bringing before our attention the contents hidden beneath the surface of things. There are not two worlds, objective and subjective respectively, but two aspects of one world—things as they are in their absolute and ultimate being, and things as they are relatively or as apprehended by our cognitive powers. Our conception of the truth is a distortion or falls short of the truth, and it is our aspiration to bring about such a coincidence as will make the relation of subject to object perfect. We draw the thing as we see it for the God of things as they are now, not to-morrow only, the sole difference being that to-morrow our painting will be truer to the original and consequently more artistic than now. All objective is immediately reduced by man, by subconscious or conscious process, into subjective, so that we may for the sake of convenience talk of subjective and objective phases of reality, the subjective being human, partial, progressive, the objective being divine, absolute, and final.
There is an objective physical world and an objective psychic or spiritual world, the latter being immanent in the former, though not limited by it, so that every material object has spiritual contents. The spiritual is no more an inside without an outside than the physical is an outside without an inside. Each has its phase of reality, though in the ultimate analysis the physical is dependent for its value upon its spiritual capacity. The physical has a non-sensible inside which to be discerned calls for distinctively human as distinguished from mere animal powers of perception. Dimly in animal life there is a recognition of inner character in objects—hostility, affinity, nourishment and the like are instinctively sensed; but here deep perception stops except where, by reason of what is called domestication or association with man, certain human characteristics are faintly imaged in dog or horse.
There is no antagonism between the physical and the spiritual. The physical world is to man a medium through which phases of the spiritual are reached. The only antagonism there can be is that which arises by an attempt to use the material without regard for its full spiritual contents or inside. Were not the physical universe a sacrament it would be a phantasm. If man divorces the inside from the outside with a view to gratifying his physical senses he abdicates his character as a man to become an animal; if to feed anything less than his entire selfhood, he presents the spectacle of arrested development. The bodily senses alone can get at the full content, the deep inside of nothing, no matter how pronounced its objectivity, “The truly real is a thing that has an inside.”[3] The more pronounced or attractive the external substance and form of a material object and the closer we are to it, the greater the difficulty for the average character to gain cognition of its spiritual essence. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God.”[4] Even those who place an undue valuation upon the material, whether possessed of wealth or not, have a like difficulty in penetrating into the internal realm which lies beneath and around as well as above and within the external.[5] It is absurd for men to expect to sense the spiritual except with spiritual faculties. The physical world is perceived by a sensory apparatus of the same substance as that of the physical world; the spiritual world is perceived by a sensory apparatus of the same substance as that of the spiritual world. There must be an inherent affinity between the thing apprehended and the organ apprehending. Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them because they are spiritually proved.[6]