In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion
that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such
mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the
religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some
care. But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary
non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate
contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms
make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common
penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are
flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme,
suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the
ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In
these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be
swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement
which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the
crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to
live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.
The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious
attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human
nature, and is anything but absurd.
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