4 Divine Cosmos

Abstract

Abstract The study of explanations in Part II commences with some notable transpersonal approaches to extrovertive mystical experience from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. R. M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter put forward evolutionary theories of cosmic consciousness, and Carpenter’s theory of race-consciousness and the Ideas anticipated C. G. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Liberal Christian thinkers balanced transcendent mysticism with the immanent path of nature mysticism, and thereby established an influential twofold typology of mystical experience. These thinkers looked outside a narrowly conceived Christianity for ideas that would enrich their explanatory frameworks: W. R. Inge drew on Plotinian philosophy, Evelyn Underhill on Henri Bergson’s vitalism, and Rudolf Otto on post-Kantian epistemology.