In brief my answer is this—and I will divide it into three parts:—
- Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
- No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
- They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses , hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but