Walter Terence Stace Quotes

The task of thought in our time is to replace the lost religious and metaphysical foundation of morals by a secular and naturalistic foundation.

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.

Morals have a perfectly firm and objective foundation in human personality. If men can be brought to understand this, then moral faith may be restored. The problem is really one of education.

Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.

The true religious doctrine is that the world is to be both denied and not to be denied.

Thus we see that mysticism naturally, though not necessarily, becomes intimately associated with whatever is the religion of the culture in which it appears.

Thus to say that God is ineffable is to say that no concepts apply to Him, and that He is without qualities.

Religion can probably out live any scientific discoveries which could be made. It can accommodate itself to them. The root cause of the decay of faith has not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the general spirit of science and certain basic assumptions upon which modern science, from the seventeenth century onwards, has proceeded.

All religious thought and speech are through and through symbolic. And this fundamental insight is perhaps as old as religion itself.

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.

It is certainly the case that there can exist an atheistic mysticism, a mystical experience naked and not clothed in any religious garb.

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 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.

People are often mistaken about what is good for the health of their bodies. That is why we have doctors. And people are just as likely to be mistaken about what will be good for the happiness of their souls. That is why we have moralists.

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.