"The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy," says Huneker in his essay "Anarchs and Ecstasy" in Bedouins, "is bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth[18-A]—who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson and Browning, only in occasional exaltation. Like the cold devils of Felicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy.... William Blake and his figures, rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy."

Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means to make stand out; the mind makes sensible things stand out because it is concentrated on particular emotions, and on the ideas associated with and springing from these emotions. We must not make the mistake of thinking that ecstasy has nothing to do with thought. On the contrary, it is too much occupied with thought. It in fact represents a form of monomania connected with a certain idea. It is a rapturous state in which the person is governed by preoccupation with a definite viewpoint. The poetic condition of ecstasy to which I refer is that mentioned by the poet Gray, in his famous Elegy, when he speaks of one of the dead who might have "waked to ecstasy the living lyre." He again uses the word in his Progress of Poesie, when he speaks of Milton, who rode "upon the seraph wings of ecstasy." Undoubtedly Gray understood by ecstasy the poetic emotion primarily. In fact, any emotion that grips a man strongly may be called ecstasy. Great grief or joy, pleasure or pain, passion or tragedy, enthusiasm for an idea or a cause, are all ecstatic conditions. The passion for social justice, an intense love for humanity, devotion to art, beauty, knowledge, the emotions of a happy or an unhappy lover, all constitute important subjects in the literature of ecstasy.

But the ecstasy must be a universal and secular ecstasy. There are two kinds of ecstasies which though universal may manifest themselves in such primitive forms as to appear only to limited circles. I refer to the ecstasy of chauvinism, or fanatical, local, unjust patriotism, and to the ecstasy of the pathologically religious victim whose views border on hallucination. For example, if a man goes into extreme rhapsodies about his particular race or country, and vituperates the people of other races or countries, and justifies tyrannical measures towards them; if, furthermore, he writes under the assumption that all the intellectual and moral virtues reside in his people,—in short, if he is purely clannish one can scarcely expect his literary product to appeal to other people than his own. Again, if we hear or read the outburst of a devotee of a particular religious sect, and we find that we can agree with him in none of the views or dogmas he entertains; if, moreover, we observe there is something also anti-human in the attitude that he takes towards life, we are revolted by his passionate outpourings.

Though every nation and every religion is and should be to some extent clannish and sectarian, still no literature that is purely so can have a universal appeal. Hence, morbidly mystical poems, celebrating union with an anthropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of conquest and imperialism, poems seething with hatred for people of other races or religions, poems poisoned by hatred for humanity, are all examples of the literature of ecstasy of a low order.

On the contrary, however, the literature of ecstasy may be both religious and patriotic, and still appeal to the world at large. I suppose the best illustration of such kind of literature is the psalms in the Old Testament. They strike a universal note and move Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, free thinkers alike. The ecstasy here does not depend upon the author's attachment to a dogma, but springs most frequently from a love of righteousness and humanity; hence the emotional appeal of the poet touches even those who are not deists. There are also fine touches and poignant prayers here and there that move even the non-Christian in some of the works of St. Augustine, Thomas À Kempis, Pascal and Bunyan.

We are not concerned here with the idea of ecstasy as a state that is supposed to give us glimpses of the deity, nor with any attempt to purify us by divesting our soul from the imperfect body and liberating it from the frailties of the flesh. On the contrary, ecstasy is nothing more than accumulated ordinary emotions and it speaks not only with the body, but with all the memories of the body. It makes use in its communications to us of those very physical infirmities that mystics assume it shuns, those residing in the body as a medium. Ecstasy employs the mind, and thus depends on the brain, the nerves, the physical senses, which are unconsciously active even in a trance, and speak out of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body.[21-A]

Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of poetry is not the same as that known to mysticism. However, the ecstasy in both springs from the unconscious and is the fruit of an emotional soul because of inherited memories of past emotions. In the ecstasy of the mystic, which is usually what is called "religious experience," there is really little application of the reason. It is even often pathological and is both the product and the cause of a belief in absurd dogmas. It is often merely a sublimated passion for morality, or the result, as Freudians have shown, of a hysterical attachment to parents, or the idealization of a father. It is often a sublimated sex love due to repression. Every one has been struck with the sensuous images in the conceptions of the mystics. Broadly speaking, mysticism seeks a condition of being united to a personal God who is supposed to exist outside of nature; it craves to partake of His holiness, and to cultivate purity and be rid of the earthy. He who rejects belief in an anthropomorphic God or to the mystics' particular religions can have little of the mystics' feelings. He does not enter into sympathy with their ideas, and this militates against the university of mystic poetry. The ecstasy does not "catch." Most of the mystic poetry of the world, especially that centering around asceticism and dogma, has importance only for the believer in the mystic's philosophy. Very little of it has literary value, although it often is presented in an emotional and effective manner.

But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism that is universal and modern, and will appeal to all in spite of their religious beliefs. When the poet recognizing God in nature seeks to identify himself with nature by love and admiration for her, by a passion for a life that is in accordance with her commands, his poetry embodying such ecstasy is universal and is lifted into a high plane. It becomes a sort of ecstatic statement of pantheistic philosophy that even the believer may accept. That is why the Persian poet, Jalalu 'l-Din Rumi, for example, appeals to us and why his works are of such high order.

Sufism or Persian mysticism began in asceticism and ended in pantheism. It became a desire of a union with nature. In fact, it was an ecstatic state of love for man, nature, God. It had its roots however in physical love, and a story is told of a man who, wanting to become a Sufi, was told first to love some woman. Some critics even declare that many of the Persian love poems are really mystical poems, and though this is only partly true, it is certain that the Persian mystical poems are really love poems.

The mystic poems of the later Mohammedan Sufis are in fact anti-Mohammedan, and yet by a curious paradox they become after much controversy acceptable to the Church.

There is also much that is modern in the Pre-buddhistic Vedas and Upanishads, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the pantheistic character of the ideas and the universality of the emotions.

The ecstasy of the pantheistic mystic is a secular feeling that we all experience, and is the substance of literature in prose and verse. We have much modern mystical poetry that has a universal appeal; it is also pantheistic in character and shows the poet's desire for union not with an anthropomorphic God, but with nature whom he recognizes as his God. The best illustration of it is the famous passage in Wordsworth's lines composed above Tintern Abbey, in which he tells us he hears in nature "the still, sad music of humanity." The entire passage is great poetry, not because of the blank verse but because of the mystical pantheistic ecstasy.

Sane mystical poetry may then be of a very high order. You will find examples of it in Blake, Emerson, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, Whitman's Chanting the Square Deific and Swinburne's Hertha are great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.

Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book, Hieroglyphics, where he touched the borders of the truth of the distinction between the literature of ecstasy and general literature, but he introduced too many unbalanced views about literature being unrelated to life. He was also thinking too exclusively of that religious ecstasy that is found in the Catholic Church only. He also took as his model for an example of ecstasy, Pickwick Papers, where there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in Vanity Fair where there is much. He also, strange to relate, found no ecstasy in Meredith or the later Hardy novels, and in no intellectual productions marked with liberal thought except those of Rabelais. He showed no insight into the real greatness of literature, because of his narrow conception of ecstasy.

Ecstasy in the broad sense is any excited condition of the emotions. Besides the meaning the word has in a narrow mystic and a medical sense, with neither of which significances are we here concerned, it is understood generally as referring to any condition where man is overpowered by his feelings. It is this condition which makes the poet write, and the reader is brought into a similar state with the poet by reading the poems. Hence when the prose writer describes his ecstatic state, or draws people into such a state, he is also a poet. The critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when ecstatical, are therefore poetry.

It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted piece of ecstatical writing.

Many people are under the impression that when we speak of ecstasy we mean a state where reason is utterly dethroned. Yet the Greeks, who make inspiration the source of art, never let the passions so rule that utter chaos resulted in the poet's creation. In Greek literature we have a blending of reason and ecstasy. Professor Butcher has pointed out in his excellent essay on "Art and Inspiration," in his Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, the potency of reason in Greek poetry. The ideas of the Greek writers were emotionalized, and there were ideas in their emotional products. Demosthenes was like Plato, a passionate thinker; Pindar, Æschylus and Sophocles were reasoning poets.

The Greeks used the word ecstasy in a modern secular sense rather than in a spiritual or pathological one. It was the unconscious memory of the poet coming to the fore and utilizing the intellect to pour light on the soul. It was not the mystic's ecstasy where irrational conclusions were arrived at because of some abnormality in the seer. The poet was always a critic and a philosopher who tamed his wildest thoughts. "Moderns are prone," says Butcher, "to believe that the action of poetic genius abdicates its rights and descends to the lower level of talent when it begins to reason. Greek literature decisively refutes such a notion. It exhibits the critical faculty as a great underlying element in the creative faculty."

Greek poetry then is the portrayal of reasoning passion, using at the same time a conscious technique. It was the outpouring of the personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It represented the breaking forth of the unconscious into expression, controlled by a censorship on the part of the poet.

Plato's idea about poetry being a form of madness may, however, still be accepted, when we understand by madness the being imbued with one's emotions in a manner not depriving the poet of his intellectual powers. Poetry is only the result of inspiration, if by this term we mean that rationalized emotions have so accumulated as suddenly to seek expression. Every poet, in prose or verse, writes from the unconscious and he usually gets lost in his own characters or speaks directly in his own person. The writer, however, is not mad, nor is his art allied to madness. He is usually too sane, using his judgment at the same time that his emotions are aroused. So we can still subscribe to Plato's idea of unconscious art, put in the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue Ion:

As long as we bear in mind that Plato's idea of madness is merely the concentration on one topic, his idea of poetry is true.

A remark of Socrates in the Phaedrus should be well pondered by disciples of art for art's sake. "He who having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted."

Plato himself was one of the finest of ancient poets, in spite of the fact that he wanted to exclude poets from his ideal commonwealth. Some of the finest prose poems and allegories of ancient literature are found in his Republic, the Phaedrus and Symposium. Most of these are known to us, and need no mention. When Plato speaks of love, he does so as a poet, and the passages on the subject in the last two named dialogues are full of poetry.

I wish to give, besides the above passage, as an illustration of Plato's own prose poetry, part of a speech by Alcibiades. It is at the conclusion of the Symposium, and is part of Alcibiades's tribute to Socrates and his speeches. Socrates, himself, thinks the speech is delivered to create trouble between him and Agathon, of whom Alcibiades is jealous. The speech is ruined also by a reference at length to a phase of Greek life which is repulsive to us. After likening Socrates to Silenus and to Marsyas, Alcibiades continues in the following prose poem:

Symonds tells us that Æschylus was the great example of unconscious art among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of poetry.

Æschylus's creation Cassandra is a good illustration of a character in an ecstatic state. Cassandra is both prophetess and poetess, and her cries move us to this day, when much of Æschylus's moral and religious philosophy bores and irritates us. She is the incarnation of woman suffering. She was ravished at Troy by Ajax and was given to Agamemnon as prisoner of war, she the princess, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She had lost most of the members of her family and now anticipated great trouble for Agamemnon whose wife Claetemnestrae was unfaithful to him. She also foresaw her own death at the queen's hands, but it was her punishment that her prophecies would not be heeded. She is partly mad, but hers is the poetic frenzy, tempered by logic. Her most meaningless ravings are full of meaning. They are poetry not because of the metre in which they are rendered, but because of the rational ecstasy. This ecstasy remains intact even in the English prose translation.

Nietzsche divided art into Apollonian and Dionysian. He found that the Dionysian state depended on emotional or orgiastic intoxication. He perceived that the ecstasy in this state was largely of a sexual character. As he boldly put it, "The desire for art and beauty is an indirect longing for the ecstasy of sexual desire, which gets communicated to the brain." This is the thesis that Freud developed. Croce, who has, however, something of the metaphysician and mystic in him, is not in sympathy with this view, for he ridicules the idea that the genesis of aesthetism lies in the desire of the male for the female. Yet he agrees with Freud in the conception that art is a means of curing oneself of sexual neurosis. "By elaborating his impressions," says Croce, "man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes them from him and makes himself their superior. The liberating and purifying function of art is another aspect and another formula of its character and activity. Activity is the deliverer, just because it drives away passivity."

Finely put, indeed, are the words of Nietzsche's views on ecstasy. "To the existence of art, to the existence of any aesthetic activity or perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is indispensable, namely ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the sensitiveness of the whole mechanism; until this takes place art is not realized.

"All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, possess this power; above all the ecstasy of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of ecstasy."

Plato, it will be recalled, compared the state of the poet to that of the reveller in the Bacchanalian rites. The favorable side of the worship of Dionysius or the Bacchic revels has been shown by Euripides in his play the Bacchae. He shows how King Pentheus was torn to pieces in mistake by his own mother for his hostility to the bacchic rites. Bacchus himself is the hero of the play. As the chorus says, Bacchus is innately modest and modest women will not be corrupted at the revels. Who is not moved by the song of the Chorus? "Would that I could go to Cyprus, the island of Venus, where the lovers dwell, soothing the minds of mortals, and to Paphos, which the waters of a foreign river flowing with an hundred mouths fertilize without rain—and to the land of Pieria, where is the beautiful seat of the Muses, the holy hill of Olympus. Lead me thither, O Bromius, Bromius, O master thou of Bacchanals. There are the Graces and there is Love and there is it lawful for the Bacchae to celebrate their orgies."

The ecstasy of the revellers at the rites was poetic ecstasy, for it was an unconscious or conscious erotic nature manifesting itself in the form of a religious rite. Bacchus, aside from being god of wine, was the symbol of productiveness and was accompanied by Priapus, and the phallus was carried about. He was youthful and his symbols were animals like the goat, ass, bull, tiger, lion, all of which had erotic significance. The ecstatic rites with which he was worshipped were introduced from Thrace.

Aristotle attributes the origin of tragedy to the use of the dithyramb of the revellers, and comedy to the phallic songs sung by them. The point is that love frenzy leads to poetry, and we have an illustration of it in the connection between the Bacchic rites and poetry, between love and art. The rites degenerated under the Romans and were soon suppressed by law.

Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the twelfth section of The Birth of Tragedy. It is the old story of the battle between the emotions and reason, the instinct and the intellect, problems which men as different as Hearn, Bergson, Nietzsche, Pater and Freud solved by seeking liberties for the instinct. Pentheus, who represents reason, is the enemy of Bacchus, but fascinated by him, loses his life; reason leads to death when it makes no concession to the instincts. The play was a protest by Euripides against his own moralizing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and Tiresius is, in the words of Nietzsche, that we must display a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of the emotional forces. Don't trifle with poetry and the ecstasies that produce it.

The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his Greek Studies, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.

The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love, for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different nations.

True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth and Whitman, dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.

And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.

Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always will be with us, and probably more so in prose than in verse. We want literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame Lespinasse, or in the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, or in the verse of Hafiz, Burns, Shelley, Browning, Heine or Verlaine.

Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his Inspiration of Poetry for a return of poetry to poetic madness. Emotion is the chief and most important element of poetry. "Emotion" as Woodberry says, "is the condition of their (the poets') existence; passion is the element of their being." When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any emotion in which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine, Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial event important poetry.

But emotions described by the poet affect people differently. I may find great emotion in reading about a man who sacrifices himself for a great and unpopular idea, but others may not be interested in that man or his idea and hence will not be moved by the work. Such a work is poetry to me and like minded readers. Further, differences of intellectual outlook on the part of the readers count in determining poetry. Socrates, Buddha, Bruno and Galileo are poetic figures to us to-day; they have been enshrined in poetry and history and we accept many of their ideas. But to their contemporaries who rejected them they were not poetic figures. Who knows but that there are figures to-day we scoff at who may have a halo of poetry in history?

A distinct but by no means essential quality of the literature of ecstasy is that of pain. There is more pain depicted in the world's literature than pleasure. In his The Nature of Poetry, Edmund Clarence Stedman speaks of a certain sadness or melancholy in the poetry of the nineteenth century but he might have said this was true of the poetry of any century. Most poetry is sad, for life often is, and the poet is naturally interested in and pays most attention to the painful emotions that trouble him. Tragedy and elegy (and the term elegy was used by the Romans not only to bemoan the dead, but to deplore sad love affairs) are predominant in all literature, prose and verse.

We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read by us because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the substance of poetry and in the public mind there has always been an association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said—"our sweetest songs are those that told the saddest thought."

It is assumed that Christianity made poetry sad but this is not so, for there is sad poetry in the Old Testament and among the Romans and the Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is intertwined with human nerves. The most frequent note in poetry is wailing and lamentation, self-pity and passionate rebuke.

In Professor William A. Neilson's Essentials of Poetry, there is an interesting chapter on sentimentalism in poetry, in which the author dwells on the sentimentalism in the poetry of the English Romantic School. He defines it as the cultivation of an emotion for the sake of the thrill. Most certainly there can be no great poetry where the sentimentalism is forced, where it becomes ridiculous, where it bubbles over and becomes monotonous. Sentimentalism often characterizes popular poetry and if the public is likely to err in judging poetry it is particularly likely to confuse sentimentalism with normal human emotions. Yet it is hard often to draw the line between sham emotions and genuine sentiment.

The poet is bound to be always sentimental to an extent because he must wear his heart on his sleeve. No one need be ashamed of unadulterated emotions, for life is made up of them.

Besides, nationalities differ. The Irish, the Jews and the Russians, for example, do not consider their own poems sentimental because these are genuine records of actual feelings characteristic of sentimental peoples; to be sure, such expressed emotions may appear as sentimental to the rest of the world. Many think that the emotion of pity, and also sympathy for the criminal that we find in Russian novels is rather sentimental and nauseating, but it is genuine Russian emotion.

We should be on our guard, however, in regarding sentimentalism as poetry. The public loves cheap popular songs and mushy lachrymose verses. The many poems, stories and plays about "mother," "baby," "the flag," "home," "our country," etc., are often drivelling sentimentalism and not poetry.

Ecstasy was the keynote of Oriental poetry. We are fortunate in having a translation in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1901 and 1902 by Duncan B. Macdonald, of a book on the laws of music and singing of ecstasy from Al Ghazzali's work on the Re-vivifying of the Sciences of the Faith. Ghazzali (1060-1111) was the greatest apologist for Islam and is known as "The Proof of Islam." He was held to be the only man who was worthy of being a prophet, next to Mohammed himself. He unfortunately dealt the death blow to Mohammedan philosophy and Averroes wrote against him. But no one among Arabs had as grand a conception of ecstasy in connection with poetry as he did. He was influenced by the Persian Sufis and defined ecstasy in a very modern manner. We may dispense with his mystic conception of it and pay attention only to his definition of it in its relation to poetry. Great admirer as he was of the Koran he recognized that poetry is more in accord with human nature than that work, and he quotes an authority to the effect that our being constituted of fanciful desires makes us more moved by poets than by the word of God. He finds various reasons for the power of poetry over us, the principal one being its quality of ecstasy. He sees that poetry has a mission in conveying ecstasy; that one of its uses is to arouse us to lamentation, to joy, to love, to courage and to religion. He analyzes the tender longing caused by love poetry, though, good Moslem that he was, he is always discriminating between poetry that arouses a lawful love, and that which has mere lust as its object.

His main contribution, however, to the philosophy of ecstasy is his recognition of its identity with the unconscious. He quotes some one to the effect that music and singing do not produce in the heart what is not in it but stir up what exists there. Ecstasy to him is the result of hearing and of understanding what is heard and applying it to an idea which occurs to the hearer. It is a condition produced in the hearer's soul due to knowledge or emotion, and the condition is varied. The following passage is especially worthy of quotation: "As for the states, how many a man gets so far as to perceive in his heart, on some occasion which may appear in it, a contraction or an expansion, yet he does not know its cause! And a man sometimes thinks about a thing, and it makes an impression on his soul. Then he forgets the cause, but the impression remains upon his soul, and he feels it. And, sometimes, the condition which he feels is a joy which arose in his soul on his thinking about a cause which produces joy; or it may have been a sorrow; then he who was thinking about it forgets it, but feels in the impression its consequence. And sometimes that condition is a strong condition which a word expressing joy or sorrow does not indicate clearly and for which he cannot come upon a suitable expression for what was intended."

Al Ghazzali gives then, as the essence of ecstasy, its unconscious nature. Ecstasy is related to longing for something unknown. All people experience in their hearts states demanding things unknown to them. He compares the situation to that of the innocent and ignorant youth in puberty who is in a state unexplained to him. Al Ghazzali is one of the first of modern critics to formulate the theory of ecstasy as the end of poetry, and his argument explains the vogue of love and mystic poetry. He recurs, it is true, to the influence of metre in poetry in inducing ecstasy, but he is always thinking of the ecstasy of love of man and God as the element of poetry, and in this he is a predecessor of Tolstoy. He also gives rules as to one's behavior in the ecstatic state and does not sanction undue madness.

A much higher form of the literature of ecstasy than the product of the immoral rites of Dionysus or the mystic poetry of Persia is the prophecy as it was known and delivered among the ancient Hebrews. Indeed, prophecy is the ideal form of the literature of ecstasy and represents the zenith of its achievement. It is the emotional verbal utterance of the unconscious of the poet, who is usually in a state of ecstasy, and who, as passages in the Bible testify, receives his message in a vision or dream. The act of prophesying was even contagious. The early prophets were like dancing dervishes in their prophesying and influenced others to do as they did. We recall how Saul stripped himself naked. The Hebrew word prophecy means utterance and the idea of foretelling the future was incidental to it. If the idea of futurity emanated from prophets, it was such insight as any gifted person may experience when he notes certain facts from which he can predict inevitable results. But the ecstatic state was always associated with the idea of prophecy, the only person, according to the account of the Bible, exempt from this state being Moses. The prophetic state was not allied to divination but resulted from moral and aesthetic inspiration such as we find in modern poets. When the Bible says, God spoke to the prophet, or the hand of God touched him, it means that the prophet was in a state of ecstasy due to a highly developed moral and social viewpoint. The true prophet's ecstasy was not accompanied by immorality or superduced by drugs or physical abuse. Music, however, was at one time used to produce the prophetic state. The aesthetic mechanism of the ancient prophets was no different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times. Moses Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed analyzes the ecstatic state of prophecy and his analysis may be applied to any high form of poetic inspiration.

Prophecy was, according to Maimonides, an emanation sent forth to man's rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty; it consisted in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty; the logical and imaginative faculties had to be balanced in the prophet; he overflowed with the frenzy of ecstasy to help his fellow-men and could not rest even at risk of personal suffering; he had courage and intuition; he reserved his message in a dream or a vision.

The psychology of the prophetic inspiration has been studied by many of the higher critics of the Bible. One of the best books on the subject is The Psychology of Prophecy by Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan, Philadelphia 1908, (Julius H. Greenstone) who says:

The ecstasy of the wild and mad kind was seen only in the early days of Hebrew prophecy, when wine and dance and music and other external means were used for bringing about this state, but the subdued elevated ecstasy due to religious temperament and patriotic fervor, due to constant and profound contemplation, was certainly the characteristic of the later prophets.... Ecstasy is usually the spring whence all the other prophetic streams flow.