The Sixth Sense by Charles H. Brent (i can read book club .txt) 📕

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]

Reality is a term too often confined to that which can be expressed in terms of bodily senses; whereas it is that which has existence in heaven above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, and which, apart from human perception, though in a minimum degree or passively, plays upon and affects man and his universe, but which reaches its highest potentiality manward when, by the volitional operation of human faculties it is subjectively apprehended and finds permanent place in his consciousness. Reality is that which supports and feeds the subconscious life by the pressure of its mere existence or laws of being, but which is capable of bestowing larger gifts in proportion to the degree in which it receives conscious admission into the activities of personal experience. It is a law of spiritual or psychic, as well as of physical, existence that every part is related to every other part and influenced by it through either attraction or energy. In the case of inanimate matter mere spacial propinquity or distance determines the measure of attraction or energy of object upon object, but where sentient beings are concerned the reaction of conscious volition on environment is the determining factor regulating the degree of influence released.

The search for the real in internal processes cannot ignore the external. Conversely the activities of the workaday world cannot summarily dismiss the internal.[7] The physical senses have a modest but indispensable part to play under the primacy of the Mystic Sense. The normal use of the Mystic Sense does not make a mystic. The healthily developed man is mystical though not a mystic. His dominating sense is that of the spirit, not that of the flesh. A mystic, technically defined, is a specialist in the subjective or internal, just as a collector is a specialist in the objective or external. There is no danger in either extreme except so far as its votary adopts an exclusive attitude toward its seeming opposite (which really is its complement), or toward the balance of human thought and life. A deliberate and persistent use of the Mystic Sense without respect for the objective would be subversive of all progress and a reversion to chaos. “The progress of thought consists in gradually separating the series of objective and universally valid, from that of subjective experiences. In the measure that their confusion prevails, man is, to all intents and purposes, mad; and it is this note of insanity that characterizes medicine and religion in their early stages. Dreams and reality are mixed up; subjective connections are objectified.”[8] If the objective and the subjective may not be divorced and set at odds against one another, neither may they be confused. Both errors would result in disorder and hopeless perplexity.

The serious crux is how, in the realm of the spiritual and the physically intangible, to distinguish between the real and the seeming, the true and the false. This it is the function of the Mystic Sense to do aided by the full complement of inner faculties. In a measure the Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, acts automatically, but like them it needs special training in order to separate phantasm from reality, to determine values, and to grade and classify ideals until they reveal themselves to be ordered unity, not less but more mysterious because more intelligible or apprehensible by the whole man. The first principle to lay down is that no man can treat himself as a unit or credit the findings of his Mystic Sense with absolute or final authority until he has tried them by some valid corporate test. Neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch, used without regard to the experience of others and respect for it, can fail to lead us astray. The conclusions of the wisest and the competent register themselves from age to age, coming to us in the shape of beneficent authority to prevent a man from repeating work that has already been done and well done. Verification is not contemptuous of authority, though he flouts authority, indeed, who ignores it in a process of individualistic experiments. Pure individualism at best can apprehend but a fragment of reality and at worst declines into eccentricity or even insanity. Those who are really educated recognize their relation to a social whole and bring the results of their sense perceptions, before accepting their verdict, to be tested by the age-long, man-wide experiences of humanity as formulated in the accepted conclusions of their generation and found in its institutions and customs. Universal experience is never wholly but only approximately infallible, yet accurate enough to be authoritative for corrective purposes. By respectful attention to it, individual judgment is checked in possible error and at the same time is given opportunity to offer its own contribution to the totality of knowledge, a contribution which may endorse, modify, or enlarge that already reached. In this way only is society preserved from becoming a mob of eccentrics and fanatics, each whirling in his own little circle. Commerce, art, science, letters, government, religion—in short every department of life you can think of requires such a mode of procedure for the protection of reality in its varied manifestations and for the protection of the individual against himself. But in no conditions is a social checking off of findings more essential than in the psychic or spiritual realm. Mystical experience organizes itself or is consciously organized in a sufficient degree to give men that high kind of freedom which comes to us when we act with constant reference to the fact that we are members one of another, so that the experience of the human race is ours wherewith to enrich ourselves. A mystic of the type of St. Theresa, who could hardly see the objective in her rush past form to reach idea, could not be distinguished from the inmate of a madhouse who insists that his tinsel crown is the diadem of a Napoleon, unless she interpreted her personal experience in relation to the spiritual consciousness of Christendom. “Once,” writes this saint, “when I was holding in my hand the cross of my rosary, He took it from me into His own hand. He returned it; but it was then four large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds: the five wounds were delineated on them with the most admirable art. He said to me that for the future that cross would appear so to me always, and so it did. The precious stones were seen, however, only by myself.”[9] A madman would have omitted the last sentence. Her mystical experience was individual though it preserved for its foundation a background of universal experience. It united her to her fellows, instead of separating her from them.

The law of use is as applicable to the Mystic Sense as to the rest of the gifts and endowments which make up the completeness of human personality. Its exercise enlarges its capacity and quickens its general efficiency; if used through the whole range of its opportunities, it becomes a hardy faculty, trustworthy in every sphere where its responsibility lies; specialization of operation in one direction, to the partial neglect of other departments open to it, produces acuteness in one direction and dulness in other directions which is characteristic of specialists in science; if the specialization is so exclusive as to shut off observation and consideration of every interest but one, there must ensue lop-sided growth and maimed personality.

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