We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience, whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most readily understand and respond to it.
Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of Soul?
And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known that more abundant life.

These are the statements of the pure religious experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is only of course in a limited and relative sense.

The subjective element, all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and control it.

Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an independent objective Reality.

This experience is more real and concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which theology seeks to explain it.