The writings of mystics always seem nonsense to the non-mystical, and apparently nothing will ever explain the one to the other. The chief difficulty is, perhaps, the freedom with which the mystic contradicts himself, and this he does largely for three reasons. First, the mystic despairs of language as an expression of his ideas, and often treats words and figures of speech loosely just because they mean little to him themselves, since he apprehends most completely in silence. Yet sometimes, in the second place, the inconsistency is studied, and the mystic is trying to suggest an a-verbal idea, doing so by a process which may be compared to the “resultant” of stresses in physics: for by two pulls at an angle to each other one may move an object between them in a direction different from either pull. Or, the same figure, one may make a wind blow a sail-boat in a path directly against itself by going off on a sufficient number of mutually correcting tacks. In the same way the mystic often feels that one of the best devices he can use to express himself is to build up verbal inconsistencies. So he declares that he goes to glory through humiliation, loses himself in order to find himself, dies in order to live, and in these statements creates an impression different from the literal meaning of any single word he uses. In art he similarly makes a monogram of cross and crown.

Various concepts bearing the label of “the world” have held an important place among the categories in terms of which men of many times and places have organized their experience. The present article attempts a case study of a single one of these — that developed by Jehovah's witnesses.

The following study is an analysis of Augustine's exegetical method with especial reference to an assessment of its critical element. The object is to find out what kind of argument the Bishop of Hippo used in his expositions of Scripture, and to pass judgment on it in terms of the canons of modern critical method. There is obviously an immense difference between what we on the one hand and what St. Augustine on the other would call a “good” argument. It seems to me profitable to inquire into this difference.

In the year 1883 Bouriant copied an inscription from a stone in the parapet of the bridge at Coptus. His transcript was sent by Maspero to Miller, who presented it before the Académie des inscriptions et belleslettres. From Miller's edition it was reprinted by Cagnat in 1908 and by Preisigke in 1913. The text is dated Pachon 23 in the eighth year of Trajan, i.e., May 18, 105 A.D., and contains the dedication Ἴσιδι τῇ χώματος. A dedication to Isis of the embankment is thoroughly Egyptian and has a parallel in the much earlier trilingual stele from Tentyra, which bears a dedication to Ἴσιςι θεᾷ μεγἰστῃ ἐπικαλουμένῃ Θερμούθι τῇ ἐπὶ τῷ χώματι καταντίον τοῦ δρόμου τῆς Ἀφροδίτης. There must have been a number of chapels up and down the Nile sacred to Isis of the embankment.