On Mysticism and Critical Realism

"Again, it seems to me that a critical realism, which found room for the duality of our full human experience--the Eternal and the Successive, supernatural and natural reality--would provide a better philosophic background to the experience of the mystics than the vitalism which appeared, twenty years ago, to offer so promising a way of escape from scientific determinism. Determinism--more and more abandoned by its old friends the physicists--is no longer the chief enemy to such a spiritual interpretation of life as is required by the experience of the mystics. It is rather a naturalistic monism, a shallow doctrine of immanence unbalanced by any adequate sense of transcendance, which now threatens to re-model theology in a sense which leaves no room for the noblest and purest reaches of the spiritual life."

Evelyn Underwood, Preface to the 12th edition of Mysticism, 1930, viii.

On Prayer and Works

"And the most deplorable thing of all is that the vain wisdom of the world compels them to apply the human standard to the divine. Many people reason quite the wrong way about prayer, thinking that good actions and all sorts of preliminary measures render us capable of prayer. But quite the reverse is the case; it is prayer which bears fruit in good works and all the virtues."

--The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 7

On Religion, Properly Understood

"Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man."

Muhammad Iqbal