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.