Home › Authors › Walter Terence Stace
Walter Terence Stace Quotes
1886–1967 England
Walter Terence Stace (17 November 1886 – 2 August 1967) was a British colonial civil servant, educator, public philosopher and epistemologist, who became best known for his writings on mysticism.
England Academics Educators Philosophers Random Walter Terence Stace quote
29 quotes
Thus to say that God is ineffable is to say that no concepts apply to Him, and that He is without qualities.
The true religious doctrine is that the world is to be both denied and not to be denied.
The same character of revelation, which we find in poetry, attaches to mystical illumination, although here the revelation is always the divine.
The pure religious consciousness lies in a region which is forever beyond all proof or disproof.
Mystics more often than not avoid direct reference to themselves.
It is certainly the case that there can exist an atheistic mysticism, a mystical experience naked and not clothed in any religious garb.
Thus we see that mysticism naturally, though not necessarily, becomes intimately associated with whatever is the religion of the culture in which it appears.
There is no such thing as natural theology. God is either known by revelation - that is to say, by intuition - or not at all.
And in the end it is because of mysticism that it is possible to say that “no man is an island” and that on the contrary every man is “a part of the main.”
The great error of traditional proofs of the existence of god is that they try to take a symbolic truth for a literal truth, a truth of fact, and then try to prove that it is a fact.
It must now be added that these attempts at proof not only fail of their purpose, and so do no good to religion, but that they positively degrade it.
Either God is a Mystery or He is nothing at all.
All religious thought and speech are through and through symbolic. And this fundamental insight is perhaps as old as religion itself.
The task of thought in our time is to replace the lost religious and metaphysical foundation of morals by a secular and naturalistic foundation.
Emotions are subjective, but psychological laws or statements about emotions, if they are true, are objective truths.
The incommensurability of the mystical with the sensory-intellectual consciousness is also the ultimate reason why we have to exclude visions and voices, telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance from the category of the mystical.
But it is not an exaggeration to say that mystical experience is everywhere unitary in the same sense that everywhere aesthetic experience is unitary. British, American, German, Indian, Chinese, Japanese art are of course very different from one another. Yet they have one root in their basic experience of beauty.
The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called “final causes.” The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose which it was supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic purpose.
The most important, the central characteristic in which all fully developed mystical experiences agree, and which in the last analysis is definitive of them and serves to mark them off from all other kinds of experiences, is that they involve the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the sense nor the reason can penetrate.
It has been said that man lives by truth, and that the truth will make us free. Nearly the opposite seems to me to be the case. Mankind has managed to live only by means of lies, and the truth may very well destroy us.
Topics Walter Terence Stace is quoted on
Works