ENDS AND MEANS
experience would take too long. It is enough, in this
place, merely to suggest that the best works of literary,
plastic and musical art give us more than mere pleasure;
they furnish us with information about the nature of the
world. The Sanctus in Beethoven's Mass in D, Seurat's
Grande Jane, Macbeth—works such as these tell us, by
strange but certain implication, something significant about
the ultimate reality behind appearances. Even from the
perfection of minor masterpieces — certain sonnets of
Mallarm<§, for instance, certain.Chinese ceramics—we can
derive illuminating hints about the 'something far more
deeply interfused/ about 'the peace of God that passeth
all understanding.' But the subject of art is1 enormous and
obscure, and my space is limited. I shall therefore confine
myself to a discussion of certain religious experiences which
bear more directly upon the present problem than do our
experiences as creators and appreciators of art.
I have spoken in the preceding chapter of meditation as
a device, in Babbitt's words, for producing a * super-rational
concentration of the will/ But meditation is more than a
method of self-education; it has also been used, in every
part of the world and from the remotest periods, as a
method for acquiring knowledge about the essential nature
of tilings, a method for establishing communion between
the soul and the integrating principle of the universe.
Meditation, in other words, is the technique of mysticism.
Properly practised, with due preparation, physical, mental
and moral, meditation may result in a state of what has
been called 'transcendental consciousness'—the direct in-
tuition of, and union with, an ultimate spiritual reality
that is perceived as simultaneously beyond the self and in
some way within it. (' God in the depths of us,' says
Ruysbroeck, 'receives God who comes to us: it is
God contemplating God.') Non-mystics have denied the
validity of the mystical experience, describing it as merely
286 *