: “I think that, while mysticism and its logic can be developed in an undisciplined way, in which no attempt is made to achieve genuine consistency, and contradictions are even reverenced as stigmata of higher truth, mysticism can also be developed in a manner which has complete logical viability, even if it involves many concepts strange to ordinary thought and reflection. The logic of a mystical absolute is the logic of a limiting case, and we must not expect a limiting case to behave in the same logical manner as a case which does not fall at the limit (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 179).
“I think that, while mysticism and its logic can be developed in an undisciplined way, in which no attempt is made to achieve genuine consistency, and contradictions are even reverenced as stigmata of higher truth, mysticism can also be developed in a manner which has complete logical viability, even if it involves many concepts strange to ordinary thought and reflection. The logic of a mystical absolute is the logic of a limiting case, and we must not expect a limiting case to behave in the same logical manner as a case which does not fall at the limit (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 179).
"I myself am a philosopher who is utterly uninterested in anything which is a mere matter of fact, externally observed, even if it is a fact connected with what people think and say…Philosophy is to me the bringing forth, not the mere registration or discovery, of conceptions which are what I should call intelligible unities, whose various components hang together necessarily, or with some approach to rational necessity, and which alone can illuminate the complex windings of fact…I think the business of philosophers is to make concepts more of a notional unity, involving a deeper belongingness, than do the concepts which occur in ordinary usage” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 171-2).
“mysticism is essentially a frame of mind connected with an absolute of some sort, meaning by an absolute an object of very peculiar type having very peculiar logical properties” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 171).
“Above all, what characterizes mysticism is a refusal to accept and use the notions of identity and diversity which the ordinary logic applies so confidently, whether in the relation of finite objects to the absolute, or of finite objects to one another…there can be no a, b, c, d, e, etc. which are not simply different names and guises of the same absolute, and which do not really differ from each other otherwise than as to morning star differs from the evening star. To take the notion of an absolute quite seriously is in fact to put the ordinary notion of diversity, and with it the ordinary notion of identity, out of action” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 173).
“The only sort of identity that can be ultimately admitted is one that can be stretched in varying degrees, which can come nearer and nearer to the limit of sheer diversity, otherness, without ever reaching it. We may say, if we like, that the absolute may be alienated from itself in different degrees in different forms or phases, and these in different degrees from one another, without ever reaching the breaking-point of sheer diversity. What we ordinarily wish to say will appear in a new form. What we ordinarily wish to say will appear in a new form in a fully developed mystical logic, in which all absurdity will be carefully circumvented. But a mystical logic, like any other logic, takes a long time in construction, and, before it is fully developed, there will be phases in which we shall seem merely to be subverting ordinary forms of expression, without putting anything effective or lucid in their place” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 173-4).
"...we may well move towards a Spinozistic logic in which, instead of saying things about separate finite logical subjects, we say them in a somewhat transformed guise of a single logical subject in so far as it is expressed in this or that modification. Instaed of saying John is tall, and Paul is fat, we may say that the absolute is tall in its Johannine aspect, fat in its Pauline one” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 176).