MYSTICISM • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Mysticism

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/mˈɪstɪsˌɪzəm/ Listen

noun

Mysticism n.

Obscurity of doctrine.

(Eccl. Hist.) The doctrine of the Mystics, who professed a pure, sublime, and wholly disinterested devotion, and maintained that they had direct intercourse with the divine Spirit, and aquired a knowledge of God and of spiritual things unattainable by the natural intellect, and such as can not be analyzed or explained.

(Philos.) The doctrine that the ultimate elements or principles of knowledge or belief are gained by an act or process akin to feeling or faith.

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Etymology of 'Mysticism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Mysticism" Quotes from Famous Books

... greatly increased in their intensity by this means. So, in dealing with his pupils, and especially with a prodigy like young Hartman, Prof. Reminitsky would call into service all the paraphernalia of religious mysticism; teaching his pupil to regard woman as the object of exalted adoration, a being too holy to be attained to even in thought. And now, of course, when the proposed accompanist turns out to be a decidedly alluring young female, it is necessary to take ...

— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... have fain declined; no indeterminate thoughts, no indefinite sensations; no languishment; and above all never more the portentous, the ominous look which often in that entrancing dance exhibits to us the mysticism of the Sybil, without one ray of ...

— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... have demonstrated how the symbolism of the modern fraternal organization has grown out of alchemy, mysticism and rosicrucianism. Some centuries ago these symbols were charged with a literal meaning. If a man, however, in the 20th century attaches a similar significance to these symbols he is rightly adjudged insane. For instance, no one in a modern civilization can retain his mental balance ...

— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds. If he describes, as in The Vicar of Tours, the woes of an old priest, ...

— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A -- Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... said that the theological and philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages was "scholastic," not mystical. No doubt "mysticism," as a mode of life aiming at the realisation of the presence of God, is as distinct from scholasticism as empiricism is from rationalism, or "tough-minded" philosophy (to use JAMES' happy phrase) is from "tender-minded". ...

— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

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