W. T. Stace

Walter Terence Stace was born in London in 1886 and studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He joined the British civil service in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1910, and served there for over twenty years, rising to become mayor of Colombo. During these years he wrote books on Greek philosophy and on Hegel, and came to know Buddhism.

In 1932 he left the civil service for Princeton University, where he taught philosophy until his retirement in 1955. Trained as an empiricist, he became increasingly concerned with religion and mysticism, in Time and Eternity (1952) and in two books of 1960: The Teachings of the Mystics, an anthology, and Mysticism and Philosophy, a philosophical study.

In Mysticism and Philosophy he argued that mystical experiences across cultures share a common core, distinguished from the interpretations placed on them, and he set out their common characteristics. His typology became the basis of later psychological measures of mystical experience, and the main target of constructivist critics from the 1970s. He died in California in 1967.

Stace also wrote clearly for the general public. His essay “Man Against Darkness”, published in The Atlantic in 1948, argued that the modern scientific worldview had destroyed belief in a purposive universe, and asked how human beings could live without it; his later work on mysticism can be read as a search for an answer.