ABSTRACT
In the last four lectures I have been taking you on a conducted tour through a series of regions that I have not, in my clear memory, ever visited. We have been travelling imaginatively, but not I should wish to hold, fantastically. Now I am returning to the cave, in order to sum up and assess the value of the whole speculative expedition. It is important to stress that what I have written involves no use of, and no appeal to, any special sort of faculty, beyond the mystical faculties inseparable from human existence, which every man evinces in some degree, as every man in some degree evinces mathematical capacity, but which some possess so pre-eminently as to deserve the special name of ‘mystics’. These faculties, we may say, looking back on the whole course of our argument, have nothing in their scope of vision or mode of operation, that is not severely logical, that may not, in fact, be regarded as the very crown and consummation of pure logic. Though they may seem, on the one hand, to involve an almost empirical encounter with an object unique, peculiar and profound, the properties of this object are all logical and categorial, even if they differ utterly from those attributed to common-or-garden objects: it exists of necessity, we cannot fully conceive of it without believing in it, it is rather than has the round of its essential characters, there is neither in it nor about it any application for the limiting notion of pure otherness, though there is room in it, and plenty of room, for what we have called a graded ‘alienation’, sometimes reduced almost to zero and sometimes stretched almost to breaking point, it requires this alienation which it also at a deeper level annuls, it admits of no consistent alternatives, and it involves various ‘coincidences’, of which the most impressive is that of the ontic modalities of what may or must be with the deontic modalities of what should be or ought to be. Whoever, in mystical feeling, approaches his absolute, whether seen in this emphasis or in that, has before him no garish empirical individual, decked out with a surprising array of characters that astonish because they might have been so different, but the Ancient of Days, the inescapable, the ever familiar, not unfitly expressed by the tautology ‘I am that I am’.
