ABSTRACT
Thanks to the watertight-compartment system of popular psychology, we are apt to personify these qualities; thinking of them as sitting, like Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, within the mind, and spinning the flax of experience into the thread of life. “The intellect by itself moves nothing,” said Aristotle, and modern psychology has but affirmed this law. Hence his quest of Reality is never undertaken, though it may be greatly assisted, by the intellectual aspect of his consciousness; for the reasoning powers as such have little initiative. Their province is analytic, not exploratory. The vindication of the importance of feeling in our life, and in particular its primacy over reason in all that has to do with man’s contact with the transcendental world, has been one of the chief works of recent psychology. Fortunately, many mystics have so written; and we, from their experiences and from the explorations of psychology upon another plane, are able to make certain elementary deductions.
