Excerpt from Selected Writings of Friedrich von Hugel:
All the finest recent psychology, indeed also the deepest epistemology, show us, and insist upon, how we, poor human beings, at least in this life, never begin (or in the long run keep up) the apprehension of things spiritual except on occasion of the awakedness and stimulation of the senses. That is, there is no such thing as an exclusively spiritual awakening to, or apprehension of, spiritual realities. This, to my mind, is already decisive against all purely spiritual, entirely mystical, quite non-historical, quite non-successive religion.
Next, religiously, the human soul, upon the whole, in the long run, in its richest developments, certainly, I think, requires not a half-way house for it on its way to God, but God himself to come down to it, not half-way but the whole way. To put it in the most homely way: surely the infant does not feel its mother's breast a 'half-way house', a queer artificial intermezzo between itself and its mother; but the infant feels that breast as the self-giving of that mother, as a self-compression, a touching condescension for bringing the mother's own life to the infant, and thus gradually to raise this infant to the mother's strength and stature. St. Augustine, surely, surely, had got this point right, in spite of the great attractions which quite certainly a purely spiritual religion possessed for wide stretches of his mind.
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