The revival1 of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features in the Christianity of our time has presented us with a number of interesting and important questions. We want to know, first of all, what mysticism really is. Secondly3, we want to know whether it is a normal or abnormal experience. And omitting many other questions which must wait their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of authentic4 information and authoritative5 truth concerning realities which lie beyond the range of human senses.
The answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish as the return of Ulysses was. The secret is kept in book after book. One can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and challenge one another,[134] like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth. For the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is usually included under psychical6 phenomena8, that is, the phenomena of dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric and occult phenomena. Thirty years ago Professor Royce said: “In the Father’s house are many mansions9, and their furniture is extremely manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing, communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the supremacy10 of the spiritual world.” These phenomena are worthy2 of careful painstaking11 study and attention, for they will eventually throw much light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact already throwing much light upon it. But they furnish us slender data for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its religious and spiritual bearing.
We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines13 which fill a large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. These doctrines had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially15 the same form if the exponents16 of them had not been mystics. Mystical[135] experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard17 the experience, as they also often do in the case of religious faith in general. Mystical experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert writers call “the mystic way.” There are as many mystical “ways” as there are gates to the New Jerusalem: “On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” One might as well try to describe the way of making love, or the way of appreciating the grand canyon18 as to describe the way to the discovery of God, as though there were only one way.
I am not interested in mysticism as an ism. It turns out in most accounts to be a dry and abstract thing, hardly more like the warm and intimate experience than the color of a map is like the country for which it stands. “Canada is very pink,” seems quite an inadequate19 description of the noble country north of our border. It is mystical experience and not mysticism that is worthy of our study. We are concerned with the experience itself, not with second-hand20 formulations of it. “The mystic,” says Professor Royce, “is a thorough-going empiricist;” “God[136] ceases to be an object and becomes an experience,” says Professor Pringle-Pattison. If it is an experience we want to find out what happens to the mystic himself inside where he lives. According to those who have been there the experience which we call mystical is charged with the conviction of real, direct contact and commerce with God. It is the almost universal testimony21 of those who are mystics that they find God through their experience. John Tauler says that in his best moments of “devout prayer and the uplifting of the mind to God,” he experiences “the pure presence of God in his own soul,” but he adds that all he can tell others about the experience is “as poor and unlike it as the point of a needle is to the heavens above us.” “I have met with my God; I have met with my Savior. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings,” says Isaac Penington in the joy of his first mystical experience. Without needlessly multiplying such testimonies22 for data, we can say with considerable assurance that mystical experience is consciousness of direct and immediate23 relationship with some transcendent reality which in the moment of experience is believed to be God. “This is He, this is He,” exclaims Isaac Penington, “there is no other: This is He whom I have[137] waited for and sought after from my childhood.” Angela of Foligno says that she experienced God, and saw that the whole world was full of God.
II
There are many different degrees of intensity25, concentration and conviction in the experiences of different individual mystics, and also in the various experiences of the same individual from time to time. There has been a tendency in most studies of mysticism to regard the state of ecstasy26 as par27 excellence28 mystical experience. That is, however, a grave mistake. The calmer, more meditative29, less emotional, less ecstatic experiences of God are not less convincing and possess greater constructive30 value for life and character than do ecstatic experiences which presuppose a peculiar31 psychical frame and disposition32. The seasoned Quaker in the corporate33 hush34 and stillness of a silent meeting is far removed from ecstasy, but he is not the less convinced that he is meeting with God. For the essentia of mysticism we do not need to insist upon a certain “sacred” mystic way nor upon ecstasy, nor upon any peculiar type of rare psychic7 upheavals35. We do need to insist, however, upon a consciousness of[138] commerce with God amounting to conviction of his presence.
“Where one heard noise
And one saw flame,
I only knew He named my name.”
Jacob Boehme calls the experience which came to him, “breaking through the gate,” into “a new birth or resurrection from the dead,” so that, he says, “I knew God.” “I am certain,” says Eckhart, “as certain as that I live, that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself.” One of these experiences—the first one—was an ecstasy, and the other, so far as we can tell, was not. It was the flooding in of a moment of God-consciousness in the act of preaching a sermon to the common people of Cologne. The experience of Penington, again, was not an ecstasy; it was the vital surge of fresh life on the first occasion of hearing George Fox preach after a long period of waiting silence. A simple normal case of a mild type is given in a little book of recent date, reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly: “After a long time of jangling conflict and inner misery36, I one day, quite quietly and with no conscious effort, stopped doing the dis-ingenuous thing [I had been[139] doing]. Then the marvel37 happened. It was as if a great rubber band which had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released and snapped back to its normal condition. Heaven and earth were changed for me. Everything was glorious because of its relation to some great central life—nothing seemed to matter but that life.” Brother Lawrence, a barefooted lay-brother of the seventeenth century, according to the testimony of the brotherhood38, attained40 “an unbroken and undisturbed sense of the Presence of God.” He was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet, faithful man who did his ordinary daily tasks with what seemed to his friends “an unclouded vision, an illuminated41 love and an uninterrupted joy.” Simple and humble42 though he was, he nevertheless acquired, through his experience of God, “an extraordinary spaciousness43 of mind.”
The more normal, expansive mystical experiences come apparently44 when the personal self is at its best. Its powers and capacities are raised to an unusual unity45 and fused together. The whole being, with its accumulated submerged life, finds itself. The process of preparing for any high achievement is a severe and laborious46 one, but nothing seems easier in the moment of success than is the accomplishment47 for which the[140] life has been prepared. There comes to be formed within the person what Aristotle called “a dexterity48 of soul,” so that the person does with ease what he has become skilled to do. Clement49 of Alexandria called a fully50 organized and spiritualized person “a harmonized man,” that is, adjusted, organized and ready to be a transmissive organ for the revelation of God. Brother Lawrence, who was thus “harmonized,” finely says, “The most excellent method which I found of going to God was that of doing my common business, purely51 for the love of God.” An earlier mystic of the fourteenth century stated the same principle in these words: “It is my aim to be to the Eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man.”
There are many human experiences which carry a man up to levels where he has not usually been before and where he finds himself possessed52 of insight and energies he had hardly suspected were his until that moment. One leaps to his full height when the right inner spring is reached. We are quite familiar with the way in which instinctive53 tendencies in us and emotions both egoistic and social, become organized under a group of ideas and ideals into a single system which we call a sentiment, such as love, or patriotism54, or[141] devotion to truth. It forms slowly and one hardly realizes that it has formed until some occasion unexpectedly brings it into full operation, and we find ourselves able with perfect ease to overcome the most powerful inhibitory and opposing instincts and habits, which, until then, had usually controlled us. We are familiar, too, with the way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind, confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes—alas not always—in a sudden flash of imaginative insight, discover a universal law revealed there and then in the single phenomenon, as Sir Isaac Newton did and as, in a no less striking way, Sir William Rowan Hamilton did in his discovery of Quaternions. Literary and artistic55 geniuses supply us with many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands revealed, as though, to use R. L. Stevenson’s illustration, a genie56 had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. Abraham Lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg address, as beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature, is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly[142] organized person, by a kindling57 flash, has at his hand all the moral and spiritual gains of a life time.
There is a famous account of the flash of inspiration given by Philo, which can hardly be improved. It is as follows: “I am not ashamed to recount my own experience. At times, when I have proposed to enter upon my wonted task of writing on philosophical58 doctrines, with an exact knowledge of the materials which were to be put together, I have had to leave off without any work accomplished59, finding my mind barren and fruitless, and upbraiding60 it for its self-complacency, while startled at the might of the Existent One, in whose power it lies to open and close the wombs of the soul. But at other times, when I had come empty, all of a sudden I have been filled with thoughts, showered down and sown upon me unseen from above, so that by Divine possession I have fallen into a rapture61 and become ignorant of everything, the place, those present, myself, what was spoken or written. For I have received a stream of interpretation62, a fruition of light, the most clear-cut sharpness of vision, the most vividly63 distinct view of the matter before me, such as might be received through the eyes from the most luminous64 presentation.”
[143]
The most important mystical experiences are something like that. They occur usually not at the beginning of the religious life but rather in the ripe and developed stage of it. They are the fruit of long-maturing processes. Clement’s “the harmonized man” is always a person who has brought his soul into parallelism with divine currents, has habitually65 practiced his religious insights and has finally formed a unified66 central self, subtly sensitive, acutely responsive to the Beyond within him. In such experiences which may come suddenly or may come as a more gradual process, the whole self operates and masses all the cumulations of a lifetime. They are no more emotional than they are rational and volitional67. We have a total personality, awake, active, and “aware of his life’s flow.” Instead of seeing in a flash a law of gravitation, or the plot and character of Hamlet, or the uncarven form of Moses the Law-giver in a block of marble, one sees at such times the moral demonstrations68 of a lifetime and vividly feels the implications that are essentially involved in a spiritual life. In the high moment God is seen to be as sure as the soul is.
“I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured69 there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
[144]
But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
To some the truth of God never comes closer than a logical conclusion. He is held to be as a living item in a creed72. To the mystic he becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been met, he is present.
Before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s stock of truth and knowledge I must say a few words about the normality or abnormality of them. Nothing of any value can be said on this point of mystical experience in the abstract. One must first catch his concrete case. Some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly73 abnormal. Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in that sense not normal occurrences. They usually indicate, furthermore, a pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more technical sense. There is, however,[145] something more to be said on this point. It seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole personality with power, in attaining74 a moral dynamic and in tapping vast reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other persons, would no doubt be called pathological. The real test here is a pragmatic one. It seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes of other men and women into more joyous75, hopeful and efficient persons. This question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled off-hand by a superficial diagnosis76.
An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder77 it may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added, however, as I have[146] already said, that mystical experience is not confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological. The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and significant and are no more marked with the stigma78 of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment79 of music, devotion to altruistic80 causes, risking one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of value.
III
We come at length to the central question of our consideration: Do mystical experiences settle anything? Are they purely subjective81 and one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be two-sided? Do they take the experiencer across the chasm82 that separates “self” from “Other”? Mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it had objective reference. It comes to the individual with indubitable authority. He is certain that he has found some thing other than himself. He has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with reality beyond the margins83 of his personal self. “A tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed,” as William James once put it.
We do not get very far when we undertake to[147] reduce knowledge to an affair of sense-experience. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” can be said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by Brahma. There are many forms of human experience in which the data of the senses are so vastly transcended84 that they fail to furnish any real explanation of what occurs in consciousness. This is true of all our experiences of value, which apparently spring out of synthetic85 or synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is unified and creative. The vibrations86 of ether which bombard the rods and cones87 of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation88 of beauty in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not the cause of it. The concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sense causes this consciousness of moral obligation. The famous answer of Leibnitz to the crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent89. To the phrase: “There is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” Leibnitz added, “except the mind itself.” That means that the creative activity of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can not be ignored in any[148] of the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. It will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato called the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss intelligently the “findings” of the mystic.
The world at the present moment is pitiably “short” in its stock of sound theories of knowledge. The prevailing90 psychologies91 do not explain knowledge at all. The behaviorists do not try to explain it any more than the astronomer92 or the physicist93 does. The psychologist who reduces mind to an aggregation94 of describable “mind-states” has started out on a course which makes an explanation forever impossible, since knowledge can be explained only through unity and integral wholeness, never through an aggregation of parts, as though it were a mental “shower of shot.” If we expect to talk about knowledge and seriously propose to use that great word truth, we must at least begin with the assumption of an intelligent, creative, organizing center of[149] self-consciousness which can transcend24 itself and can know what is beyond and other than itself. In short, the talk about a “chasm” between subject and object—knower and thing known—is as absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between the convex and the concave sides of a curve. Knowledge is always knowledge of an object and mystical experience has all the essential marks of objective reference, as certainly as other forms of experience have.
Professor J. M. Baldwin very well says that there is a form of contemplation in which, as in ?sthetic experience, the strands95 of the mind’s diverging96 dualisms are “merged and fused.” He adds: “In this experience of a fusion97 which is not a mixture but which issues in a meaning of its own sort and kind, an experience whose essential character is just this unity of comprehension, consciousness attains98 its completest, its most direct, and its final apprehension99 of what Reality is and means.” It really comes round to the question whether the mind of a self-conscious person has any way of approach, except by way of the senses, to any kind of reality. There is no a priori answer to that question. It can only be settled by experience. It is, therefore, pure dogmatism to say, as Professor Dunlap in his recent attack on[150] mysticism does, that all conscious processes are based on sense-stimulation and all thought as well as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimulus100. It is no doubt true that behavior psychology101 must resort to some such formula, but that only means that such psychology is always dealing102 with greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it attempts to deal with persons like us who, in the richness of our concrete lives, are never reduced to “behavior-beings.” We have interior dimensions and that is the end on’t! Some persons—and they are by no means feeble-minded individuals—are as certain that they have commerce with a world within as they are that they have experiences of a world outside in space. Thomas Aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine14 leaned toward mysticism, though he was most certainly “a harmonized man,” and who in theory postponed103 the vision of God to a realm beyond death, nevertheless had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of his Summa Theologiae. When he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, “I have seen that which makes all that I have written look small to me.”
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It may be just possible that there is a universe of spiritual reality upon which our finite spirits open inward as inlets open into the sea.
“Like the tides on the crescent sea-beach
When the moon is new and thin
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in;
Come from that mystic ocean
But others call it God.”
Such a view is perfectly106 sane107 and tenable; it conflicts with no proved and demonstrated facts either in the nature of the universe or of mind. It seems anyway to the mystic that there is such a world, that he has found it as surely as Columbus found San Salvador, and that his experience is a truth-telling experience.
IV
But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the mystic justified108 in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience to discover what a meager[152] stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. William James’ remarkable109 experience in the Adirondack woods very well illustrates110 the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some sort, if one could only tell the significance.... In point of fact, I can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it was significant of, so that it remains111 a mere112 boulder113 of impression.”[7] At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity114 of man’s psychological commerce with something Ideal that feels as if it were also actual.”[8] The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, Meister Eckhart, could not put his impression into words or ideas. What he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., an Object with no particular differentiated115, concrete characteristics. It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the via negativa, the way of negation116, or that they called their discovery “the divine Dark.”
“Whatever your mind comes at
I tell you flat
God is not that.”
[153]
Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of “the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. It is the awareness117 of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”
The most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge, not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an unusual radiant power of life. In short, the whole personality, in the case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding, spiritual substance. We are quite familiar with the way in which adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and incalculable power to brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May not, perhaps, some energy from some Source with which our spirits are allied118 flush our inner being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified119 to stand the universe and more than stand[154] it! “We are more than conquerors120 through Him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt.
Mystical experience—and we must remember as Santayana has said, that “experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand meanings”—does at least one thing. It makes God sure to the person who has had the experience. It raises faith and conviction to the nth power. “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” is St. Paul’s testimony. “I knew God by revelation,” declares George Fox. “I was as one who hath the key and doth open.” “The man who has attained this felicity,” Plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening121 of his happiness for that” (En. I: iv. 7). But this experience, with its overwhelming conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the difficulty:
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?”
[155]
There is no concrete “information” which can be shared with others.
When Columbus found San Salvador he was able to describe it to those who did not sail with him in the Santa Maria, but when the mystic finds God he can not give us any “knowledge” in plain words of everyday speech. He can only refer to his boulder, or his Gibraltar, of impression That situation is what we should expect. We can not, either, describe any of our great emotions. We can not impart what flushes into our consciousness in moments of lofty intuition. We have a submerged life within us which is certainly no less real than our hand or foot. It influences all that we do or say, but we do not find it easy to utter it. In the presence of the sublime122 we have nothing to say—or if we do say anything it is a great mistake! Language is forged to deal with experiences which are common to many persons, i.e., to experiences which refer to objects in space. We have no vocabulary for the subtle, elusive123 flashes of vision which are unique, individual and unsharable, as for instance is our personal sense of “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” We are forced in all these matters to resort to symbolic124 suggestion and to artistic devices. Coventry Patmore said with much insight:
[156]
“In divinity and love
What’s best worth saying can’t be said.”
I believe that mystical experiences do in the long run expand our knowledge of God and do succeed in verifying themselves. Mysticism is a sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies125, as a basic substance, much that is best in religion, in ethics126 and in life itself. It has generally been the mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted127 out new ways forward in the jungle of our world, or lifted our race to new spiritual levels. Their experiences have in some way equipped them for unusual tasks, have given supplies of energy to them which their neighbors did not have, and have apparently brought them into vital correspondence with dimensions and regions of reality that others miss. The proof that they have found God, or at least a domain128 of spiritual reality, does not lie in some new stock of knowledge, not in some gnostic secret, which they bring back; it is to be seen rather in the moral and spiritual fruits which test out and verify the experience.
Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis as much as consciousness of God does. These values have no objective standing12 ground in current psychology. They are not[157] things in the world of space. They submit to no adequate casual explanation. They have their ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical order, a world composed of quantitative129 masses of matter in motion. These experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize and of which we have scant130 and imperfect accounts in our text-books. Our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than atoms and molecules131. Only very slowly and gradually has the race learned through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable132 and indescribable as the mystic’s experience of God is. Plato often speaks as though he had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths are very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to assist others to experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish, is without increase or diminution133 and endures for everlasting134.”[158] But as a matter of fact, however exalted135 heavenly and enduring beauty may be in its essence we know what it is only as it appears in fair forms of objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious136 blending of sounds or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects in one unity which is as it ought to be. Truth and moral goodness always transcend our attainments137 and we sometimes feel that the very end and goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain39 or whatever goodness we do achieve is always concrete. Truth is just this one more added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness is just this simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of faith in the midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowledge of God is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy; it is an intuitive personal touch with God, felt to be the essentially real, the bursting forth138 of an intense love for him which heightens all the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory results which verify it. “All I could never be” now is. It seems possible to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformation[159] of it. The bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. And if the experience does not prove that the soul has found God, it at least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly unnecessary.
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1
revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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2
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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3
secondly
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| adv.第二，其次 | |
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4
authentic
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| a.真的，真正的；可靠的，可信的，有根据的 | |
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authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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6
psychical
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| adj.有关特异功能现象的；有关特异功能官能的；灵魂的；心灵的 | |
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7
psychic
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| n.对超自然力敏感的人；adj.有超自然力的 | |
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8
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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9
mansions
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| n.宅第，公馆，大厦( mansion的名词复数 ) | |
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10
supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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11
painstaking
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| adj.苦干的；艰苦的，费力的，刻苦的 | |
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12
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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13
doctrines
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| n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 )；教义；学说；（政府政策的）正式声明 | |
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14
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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15
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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exponents
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| n.倡导者( exponent的名词复数 )；说明者；指数；能手 | |
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retard
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| n.阻止，延迟；vt.妨碍，延迟，使减速 | |
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18
canyon
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| n.峡谷，溪谷 | |
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19
inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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21
testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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22
testimonies
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| （法庭上证人的）证词( testimony的名词复数 )； 证明，证据 | |
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23
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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24
transcend
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| vt.超出，超越(理性等)的范围 | |
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25
intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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26
ecstasy
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| n.狂喜，心醉神怡，入迷 | |
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27
par
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| n.标准，票面价值，平均数量；adj.票面的，平常的，标准的 | |
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28
excellence
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| n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德 | |
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29
meditative
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| adj.沉思的，冥想的 | |
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30
constructive
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| adj.建设的，建设性的 | |
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31
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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32
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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33
corporate
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| adj.共同的，全体的；公司的，企业的 | |
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34
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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35
upheavals
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| 突然的巨变( upheaval的名词复数 )； 大动荡； 大变动； 胀起 | |
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36
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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37
marvel
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| vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事 | |
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38
brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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39
attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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40
attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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41
illuminated
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| adj.被照明的；受启迪的 | |
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42
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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43
spaciousness
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| n.宽敞 | |
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44
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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45
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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46
laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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47
accomplishment
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| n.完成，成就，（pl.）造诣，技能 | |
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48
dexterity
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| n.(手的)灵巧，灵活 | |
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49
clement
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| adj.仁慈的；温和的 | |
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50
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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51
purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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52
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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53
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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54
patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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55
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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56
genie
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| n.妖怪，神怪 | |
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57
kindling
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| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
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58
philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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59
accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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60
upbraiding
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| adj.& n.谴责（的）v.责备，申斥，谴责( upbraid的现在分词 ) | |
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61
rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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62
interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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63
vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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64
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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65
habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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66
unified
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| (unify 的过去式和过去分词)； 统一的； 统一标准的； 一元化的 | |
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67
volitional
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| adj.意志的，凭意志的，有意志的 | |
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68
demonstrations
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| 证明( demonstration的名词复数 )； 表明； 表达； 游行示威 | |
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69
conjectured
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| 推测，猜测，猜想( conjecture的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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70
groaned
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| v.呻吟( groan的过去式和过去分词 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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71
spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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72
creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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73
undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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74
attaining
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的现在分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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75
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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76
diagnosis
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| n.诊断，诊断结果，调查分析，判断 | |
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77
beholder
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| n.观看者，旁观者 | |
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78
stigma
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| n.耻辱，污名；(花的)柱头 | |
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79
enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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80
altruistic
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| adj.无私的，为他人着想的 | |
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81
subjective
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| a.主观(上)的，个人的 | |
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82
chasm
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| n.深坑，断层，裂口，大分岐，利害冲突 | |
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83
margins
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| 边( margin的名词复数 )； 利润； 页边空白； 差数 | |
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84
transcended
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| 超出或超越（经验、信念、描写能力等）的范围( transcend的过去式和过去分词 )； 优于或胜过… | |
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85
synthetic
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| adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品 | |
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86
vibrations
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| n.摆动( vibration的名词复数 )；震动；感受；（偏离平衡位置的）一次性往复振动 | |
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87
cones
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| n.（人眼）圆锥细胞；圆锥体( cone的名词复数 )；球果；圆锥形东西；（盛冰淇淋的）锥形蛋卷筒 | |
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88
appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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89
cogent
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| adj.强有力的，有说服力的 | |
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90
prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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91
psychologies
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| n.心理学( psychology的名词复数 )；心理特点；心理影响 | |
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92
astronomer
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| n.天文学家 | |
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93
physicist
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| n.物理学家，研究物理学的人 | |
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94
aggregation
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| n.聚合，组合；凝聚 | |
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95
strands
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| n.（线、绳、金属线、毛发等的）股( strand的名词复数 )；缕；海洋、湖或河的)岸；（观点、计划、故事等的）部份v.使滞留，使搁浅( strand的第三人称单数 ) | |
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96
diverging
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| 分开( diverge的现在分词 )； 偏离； 分歧； 分道扬镳 | |
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97
fusion
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| n.溶化；熔解；熔化状态，熔和；熔接 | |
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98
attains
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的第三人称单数 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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99
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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100
stimulus
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| n.刺激，刺激物，促进因素，引起兴奋的事物 | |
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101
psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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102
dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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103
postponed
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| vt.& vi.延期，缓办，（使）延迟vt.把…放在次要地位；[语]把…放在后面（或句尾）vi.（疟疾等）延缓发作（或复发） | |
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104
rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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105
longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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106
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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107
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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108
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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109
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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110
illustrates
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| 给…加插图( illustrate的第三人称单数 )； 说明； 表明； （用示例、图画等）说明 | |
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111
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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112
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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113
boulder
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| n.巨砾；卵石，圆石 | |
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114
vivacity
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| n.快活，活泼，精神充沛 | |
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115
differentiated
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| 区分，区别，辨别( differentiate的过去式和过去分词 )； 区别对待； 表明…间的差别，构成…间差别的特征 | |
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116
negation
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| n.否定；否认 | |
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117
awareness
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| n.意识，觉悟，懂事，明智 | |
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118
allied
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| adj.协约国的；同盟国的 | |
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119
fortified
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| adj. 加强的 | |
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120
conquerors
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| 征服者，占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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121
lessening
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| 减轻，减少，变小 | |
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122
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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123
elusive
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| adj.难以表达(捉摸)的；令人困惑的；逃避的 | |
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124
symbolic
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| adj.象征性的，符号的，象征主义的 | |
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125
underlies
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| v.位于或存在于（某物）之下( underlie的第三人称单数 )；构成…的基础（或起因），引起 | |
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126
ethics
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| n.伦理学；伦理观，道德标准 | |
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127
spotted
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| adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的 | |
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128
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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129
quantitative
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| adj.数量的，定量的 | |
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130
scant
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| adj.不充分的，不足的；v.减缩，限制，忽略 | |
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131
molecules
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| 分子( molecule的名词复数 ) | |
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132
ineffable
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| adj.无法表达的，不可言喻的 | |
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133
diminution
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| n.减少；变小 | |
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134
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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135
exalted
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| adj.(地位等)高的，崇高的；尊贵的，高尚的 | |
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136
harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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137
attainments
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| 成就，造诣； 获得( attainment的名词复数 )； 达到； 造诣； 成就 | |
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138
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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