MYSTICISM

In Religion, a word of very vague signification, applied, for the most part, indiscriminately to all those views or tendencies in religion which aspire towards a more direct communication between man and God, not through the medium of the senses, but through the inward perception of the mind, than that which is afforded us through revelation. Thus, the Pantheism of the ancient philosophers and many modem religionists, which supposed a God existing in all space and matter, and revealed to us in the outward manifestations of things; the Quietism of Madame Guyon, Fenelon, ., who sought for direct revelation from the Divinity to the believer in a species of ecstasy; the Pietism of Molinos, .; the doctrines of the lUuminati in Germany; the visions of Swedenborg; and some of the notions prevalent among the Methodists and other sects among ourselves — all approximate to mysticism. See, as to the early Christian mystics of the East, the first volume of Mosheim j as to those of the West, the third (transl. ed. 1790, p. 352.). [s. 816]