Quick Answer
An atheist philosopher wrote the most rigorous defence of the claim that mystics everywhere are describing the same thing. Stace splits the experience into two types, separates what happened from what the mystic said it meant, and lists the characteristics of each. The separation is the move everything hangs on and it is the move the next generation demolished. It is also, quietly, the source of the questionnaire that current psychedelic trials still score people with.
Key Takeaways
- Two types: extrovertive, through the world; introvertive, with the world emptied out.
- Experience against interpretation is the load-bearing distinction.
- Written by a naturalist, which makes the sympathy harder to dismiss.
- Katz took it apart eighteen years later, and that argument is still running.
- The modern measures descend from here, mostly unacknowledged.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
Mysticism and Philosophy was published in 1960 by Lippincott and runs a little under three hundred and fifty pages.
It is a work of analytic philosophy applied to a subject analytic philosophy had mostly declined to touch. Stace takes the reports of mystics from several traditions, asks what can be established about them, and proceeds by numbered claims and stated objections.
The book has three tasks. To determine whether mystical experiences share a common character across cultures. To ask what, if anything, follows from them about the nature of reality. And to establish a method for answering the first question that does not simply assume the answer.
The method is the contribution, and it is also where the book is most vulnerable.
A companion volume. Stace also published The Teachings of the Mystics, a shorter anthology with commentary, in the same period. It is the accessible version and it presents the conclusions without the argument. This book is where the work is done.
Who W. T. Stace Was
Walter Terence Stace was born in London in 1886 into a military family and educated in Britain and at Trinity College Dublin.
He then did something that shaped everything he later wrote about religion. He joined the Ceylon Civil Service and spent twenty years there, rising to mayor of Colombo, administering a colonial territory whose population was overwhelmingly Buddhist and Hindu.
He retired from the service in 1932, moved to the United States, and joined the philosophy department at Princeton, where he taught until 1955 and produced a substantial body of work on Hegel, on the theory of knowledge, and on ethics.
The Ceylon years are not decoration. A philosopher writing about comparative mysticism who has spent two decades inside a Buddhist society is working from something other than an anthology, and the ease with which he handles non-Western material reflects it.
The Unbeliever's Position
The fact most often left out of summaries, and it changes how the book reads.
Stace was not a religious man. In 1948 he published an essay arguing that the scientific picture of the world had removed the ground from under human meaning, that this was a genuine loss, and that no honest person could recover the old certainties.
He was, in the vocabulary of the period, a naturalist. He did not believe in a personal God, did not hold that mystical experience proves the existence of one, and says so directly in this book.
What he does hold is that the reports are worth taking seriously as reports, that dismissing them as pathology or confusion is bad method, and that a philosopher's job is to find out what they say before deciding what to do with them.
This makes his conclusion harder to wave away than a believer's would be. He had no stake in mystics agreeing with each other, and he concluded that they do.
The Problem He Set Himself
The question is simpler to state than to answer: are mystics across traditions describing the same experience.
The difficulty is that the descriptions are wildly different. A Christian contemplative speaks of union with a personal God, a Buddhist of emptiness and the absence of self, a Vedantin of identity with an impersonal absolute. Taken at face value these are not compatible.
One response is Zaehner's: take them at face value, conclude they had different experiences. Another is the popular perennialist one: assume they are the same underneath and quote selectively.
Stace wants a third route with an argument in it. His proposal is that the descriptions differ because the interpretations differ, and that underneath the interpretation there is something reportable that can be compared.
Experience and Interpretation
The central move of the book and the one everything else rests on.
Stace argues that all perception involves interpretation, not just mystical perception. You see a shape and take it to be a tree; the shape is what is given, the tree is what you make of it. The two are distinguishable even though they arrive together.
Applied to mysticism, the claim is that a mystic undergoes something, and then describes it using the only conceptual equipment they have, which is supplied by their tradition.
A Christian who has been taught that the highest good is union with God will report union with God. A Buddhist who has been taught that there is no self will report the absence of self. On Stace's account these may be the same event in two vocabularies.
His method follows: strip the descriptions of what is clearly doctrinal and see what remains. If what remains is common across traditions, the common core thesis is supported by evidence rather than asserted.
The distinction is doing enormous work and it is worth seeing exactly how much. If experience and interpretation can be separated, then agreement underneath disagreement is possible, and the whole comparative project is viable. If they cannot, then there is nothing under the descriptions to compare, and every apparent similarity is an artefact of the person doing the comparing. Stace understood that this was the hinge and he defended it at length. He did not defend it successfully enough, which is the story of the fifty years afterwards.
Extrovertive Mysticism
The first of his two types, and the more common.
Here the senses continue to operate. The person sees the world in front of them, and sees it as one: the multiplicity of objects apprehended as a single living presence, with each thing somehow being the whole.
The reports come from many sources. Nature experiences of the kind the Romantic poets described. Sudden episodes in ordinary settings, in a garden or a street, reported by people with no religious formation at all. Passages in the mystical literature where the world is seen transfigured rather than left behind.
Stace treats this as genuine and as incomplete. The unity is perceived through the many rather than directly, so the experience retains a duality it has not resolved.
He is careful to note that this type occurs to people who were not seeking it and had no framework for it, which is evidence that it is not being produced by expectation.
Introvertive Mysticism
The second type, which he considers the complete form and to which he gives most of the book.
Here the movement is inward and subtractive. Sensation is set aside, then images, then thoughts, then the whole content of consciousness, until what remains is awareness with nothing in it.
Stace insists this is not unconsciousness. The person is awake and aware. What is absent is any object of awareness, so that consciousness is present without being consciousness of anything.
He calls this the unitary consciousness or the pure consciousness event, and it is the concept the later literature took from him and argued about for decades.
His evidence spans traditions: the Vedantic descriptions of consciousness without an object, the Buddhist accounts of the cessation of mental content, the Christian apophatic writers, and Eckhart in particular, whose language of the ground of the soul Stace finds unusually precise about this.
His argument for the common core is strongest here. An empty consciousness has no features by which one tradition's version could differ from another's, because there is nothing in it to differ.
The Common Characteristics
The itemised list, given separately for each type, and the part of the book that has travelled furthest.
For the introvertive type he gives seven. The unitary consciousness, emptied of all content. Its non-spatial and non-temporal character. A sense of objectivity or reality, that this is not a subjective state but a disclosure of what is. Blessedness, peace, joy. A sense of the holy or sacred. Paradoxicality. And the claim by the experiencer that it cannot be described.
The extrovertive list overlaps and substitutes the unifying vision of the world, and an apprehension of the many as one living presence, for the first two items.
What is striking about the lists is how specific they are. These are not vague markers of intensity of the kind James had given. They are claims about content, and they can be checked against a report.
That specificity is why the lists could later be turned into instruments, which is what happened to them.
Paradox and the Ineffable
Two of the characteristics that Stace handles more carefully than most.
Mystics contradict themselves constantly. The experience is nothing and it is everything; it is empty and it is full; the soul is annihilated and the soul is preserved. The literature is saturated with this.
The easy readings are that the mystics are confused, or that they are gesturing at something beyond logic. Stace rejects both. His proposal is that paradox is what results when an experience with a particular structure is forced through language built for a different one, and that the contradictions are systematic rather than random.
On ineffability he is sharper still, and slightly deflationary. He notes that mystics declare the experience indescribable and then describe it at length, often for hundreds of pages, which suggests ineffability is a claim about adequacy rather than a report of total failure.
This is a more useful position than the reverent one, and it lets him keep working with texts that announce their own impossibility.
Is It Objective
The philosophical question the second half of the book turns on.
Mystics report that what they encountered was real, more real than ordinary experience, and not a state of their own minds. Stace asks whether that claim can be assessed.
His answer is carefully negative and not dismissive. The usual criteria for objectivity are agreement between observers and orderliness of what is observed. Mystical experience satisfies agreement to a degree, since the reports converge. It does not satisfy orderliness, since there is nothing in the experience to be orderly.
He concludes that the question is undecidable on the available criteria, and that both the claim that it is objective and the claim that it is merely subjective go beyond what can be shown.
Readers wanting the book to establish that mystics contact reality will be disappointed. That restraint is what makes the rest of it credible.
What It Does Not Prove
Worth stating plainly, since the book is often recruited for arguments it declines to make.
Stace does not argue that mystical experience demonstrates the existence of God. He notes that the introvertive experience has no content, that a contentless experience cannot by itself be an encounter with a personal deity, and that the theistic interpretations are interpretations.
He does not argue that mysticism validates any particular religion. His conclusion, if anything, embarrasses all of them equally, since it makes the doctrinal differences secondary to something none of them owns.
And he does not argue that the experience is good for you, or that it makes people better, which the devotional literature assumes and which he treats as a separate empirical question.
Against Zaehner
The direct contemporary opponent, writing three years earlier, and the contrast is instructive.
Zaehner had argued for distinct types that cannot be collapsed, with theistic union at the top, and had taken mescaline to prove Huxley wrong about the drug producing anything comparable.
Stace's position inverts nearly all of it. The types are two rather than three. They are not ranked by theology. The differences between traditions belong to interpretation rather than to the experiences themselves. And on the drug question he is untroubled, holding that if the resulting state has the characteristics then it is what it is, whatever produced it.
The exchange between them defined the field for a generation and both were partly right, which is the usual outcome.
Zaehner was right that the texts say different things and that reading past the differences is bad method. Stace was right that the differences frequently track doctrine rather than description, and that some convergence remains after the doctrine is set aside.
The Constructivist Demolition
The reply that changed the field, and it lands directly on the hinge.
In 1978 Steven Katz published an essay arguing that there are no unmediated experiences of any kind. What a person perceives is shaped by the concepts, expectations, language and training they bring, and this shaping is not a layer added afterwards. It is constitutive.
Applied to Stace: a Buddhist does not have an experience and then describe it in Buddhist terms. Years of Buddhist practice, aimed at specific outcomes described in advance, produce a Buddhist experience. The tradition is upstream of the event, not downstream of it.
If that is right, Stace's method collapses. There is no residue left after the interpretation is stripped away, because the interpretation went in at the start.
The reply on Stace's side, developed by Robert Forman and others, concedes most of this and holds the line at one point: an experience with no content cannot have been shaped by concepts, because there is nothing there for concepts to have shaped. The pure consciousness event is the exception that the constructivist argument cannot reach.
Whether that exception holds is where the argument sits today, and it has not been settled.
The Questionnaire Nobody Credits
The most consequential thing this book did, and it happened outside philosophy.
In 1962 Walter Pahnke, a doctoral student at Harvard, ran an experiment in which divinity students received psilocybin or a placebo before a Good Friday service. To assess the results he needed a way to score whether a mystical experience had occurred.
He built the measure from Stace's characteristics, more or less directly: unity, transcendence of time and space, a sense of objective reality, sacredness, positive mood, paradoxicality, ineffability.
That instrument was revised and validated repeatedly over the following decades and became the standard mystical experience questionnaire used in contemporary psychedelic research. When a modern trial reports that a given proportion of participants had a complete mystical experience, it is reporting a score on a scale descended from this book.
The irony is considerable. A philosopher's list, produced by close reading of medieval texts, became the operational definition used in clinical work sixty years later, and the papers usually cite the questionnaire rather than the source.
This also means the constructivist objection reaches further than philosophy. If the instrument was built from Stace's categories, then it will find what those categories describe, and a participant who had some other kind of profound experience may score low on a scale that was never designed to detect it. The measure is not neutral about what counts. It inherited a position in a philosophical argument, and it carried that position into the clinic without anyone needing to defend it again.
What Survives
Three things, after the objections have done their work.
The two types. The extrovertive and introvertive division is descriptively useful, is still taught, and sorts the reports better than any competing scheme.
The characteristics. Whatever their theoretical status, they are a good checklist for reading a mystical text closely, and they force attention onto content rather than intensity.
The seriousness. An atheist philosopher spending three hundred pages establishing what a body of religious testimony actually claims, before deciding what to do with it, is a model of method that remains rare in both directions.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have absorbed the assumption that all mystics say the same thing and want the strongest argument for it rather than the usual anthology.
Read it alongside Zaehner, which is the case against, and the pair together is more instructive than either alone.
Read it if you follow psychedelic research, because it is where the measuring instrument came from and knowing that changes how the results read.
Read it if you practise anything contemplative and want a clear description of what the introvertive state is claimed to be, stated by someone with no interest in selling it to you.
The question Stace leaves you with is not whether the mystics agree. It is whether you can ever get underneath a description to the thing described, in your own case as much as anyone else's. When something happens to you and you reach for words, the words you reach for were supplied by whatever you have read and been taught, and they arrive so fast that the gap between the event and the account of it is not something you can inspect from inside. Stace thought the gap could be prised open by careful comparison. Katz thought there was no gap. Both were describing your own memory of last Tuesday as much as a fourteenth-century Rhineland friar's.
The perennialist case made by someone who had no reason to want it to be true.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the constructivist objection and of what the book declines to prove is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Mysticism and Philosophy about?
W. T. Stace's 1960 analysis of mystical experience, arguing that it falls into two types found across cultures, and that the experience itself can be separated from the doctrines used to interpret it.
Who was W. T. Stace?
A British-born philosopher, 1886 to 1967, who spent twenty years in the colonial civil service in Ceylon before becoming a professor at Princeton. He was a naturalist who did not hold religious beliefs.
What is extrovertive mysticism?
Experience in which unity is perceived through the ordinary world rather than apart from it. The senses stay active and the many objects of perception are apprehended as one living presence.
What is introvertive mysticism?
Experience reached by emptying consciousness of all content, arriving at awareness with nothing in it. Stace treats this as the more complete of the two types and gives it most of his attention.
What is the experience and interpretation distinction?
His central methodological claim: that the raw experience can be separated from the doctrinal account a mystic gives of it, so that similar experiences may be described very differently by people from different traditions.
What are the common characteristics he lists?
Seven for each type, including a sense of unity, of objectivity or reality, of blessedness, of the holy, paradoxicality, and the claim that the experience cannot be adequately put into words.
How does he differ from Zaehner?
Zaehner argued for distinct types that cannot be reduced to one another and ranked theistic union highest. Stace argues for a common core across traditions with differences belonging to interpretation.
What is the constructivist reply?
Steven Katz and others argued that there is no unmediated experience, that the concepts a person brings shape what they undergo, and that Stace's separation of experience from interpretation cannot be made.
Was Stace religious?
No, and it matters for reading him. He was a naturalist who had earlier written about the loss of meaning in a scientific worldview, and he does not treat mystical experience as evidence for God.
How does the book relate to psychedelic research?
Directly. Walter Pahnke built his experimental measures from Stace's characteristics, and the mystical experience questionnaires used in current clinical trials descend from that categorisation.
Is it hard to read?
It is analytic philosophy and it is unusually clear. Stace numbers his claims, states objections plainly and answers them in order, and assumes no specialist background.
Who should read it?
Readers who want the perennialist case argued rigorously rather than asserted, and anyone interested in where the modern measurement of mystical experience came from.
Check the instrument before you trust the number
Every time you read that some percentage of trial participants had a full mystical experience, a philosopher's reading of medieval Christian and Vedantic texts is doing the counting. That is not a scandal. Stace did careful work and the categories are good ones. It is worth knowing all the same, because a scale finds what it was built to find, and the thing it was built from was a position in an argument that never actually got settled. Numbers inherit their arguments quietly, and they carry them into places where nobody thinks to look.
Sources & References
- Stace, W. T. (1960). Mysticism and Philosophy. Lippincott.
- Stace, W. T. The Teachings of the Mystics, the companion anthology.
- Zaehner, R. C. Mysticism Sacred and Profane, the opposing account.
- Katz, Steven T. (1978). Essays on the constructivist critique of common-core claims.
- Forman, Robert K. C. On the pure consciousness event and the reply to Katz.
- Pahnke, W. N. The Good Friday experiment and the origin of the mystical experience measures.