HIS ESCAPE FROM DOUBT

the Sufis Muslim mystics who seek direct personal experience of God call "ecstasy" ("hāl" original: "hāl" — a transitory spiritual state of enlightenment), that is to say, according to them, a state in which, absorbed in themselves and in the suspension of sense-perceptions, they have visions beyond the reach of intellect. Perhaps also Death is that state, according to that saying of the Prince of prophets A title for Muhammad:

"Men are asleep; when they die, they wake."

Our present life in relation to the future is perhaps only a dream, and man, once dead, will see things in direct opposition to those now before his eyes; he will then understand that word of the Koran The central religious text of Islam,

"To-day we have removed the veil from thine eyes and thy sight is keen."

Such thoughts as these threatened to shake my reason, and I sought to find an escape from them. But how? In order to disentangle the knot of this difficulty, a proof was necessary. Now a proof must be based on primary assumptions Fundamental truths that cannot be proven but must be accepted, such as "the whole is greater than the part", and it was precisely these of which I was in doubt. This unhappy state lasted about two months, during which I was, not, it is true, explicitly or by profession, but morally and essentially a thoroughgoing sceptic.

God at last deigned to heal me of this mental malady; my mind recovered sanity and equilibrium, the primary assumptions of reason recovered with me all their stringency and force. I owed my deliverance, not to a concatenation of proofs and arguments, but to the light which God caused to penetrate into my heart—the light which

notice to Augustine A later addition likely comparing this "divine light" to the conversion experience of St. Augustine of Hippo