How are we to define this word Mystic?

Dr Inge, in his Christian Mysticism, devotes an appendix of fourteen pages to quotations and discussions of definitions. The two briefest are by the two greatest, perhaps, of his authors. St Bonaventura writes (in a sentence later adopted by Jean Gerson): “It is the reaching out of the soul to God through the yearning of love.” Goethe wrote: “It is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings”; i.e. the attempt to solve the Riddle of the Universe, not by logic, but by sympathetic intuition. Hence it has always a tendency to symbolism: its language is necessarily symbolical. The mystic mind, intent upon God, seeks to find Him everywhere; that is, it seeks to penetrate to Him through the visible objects of this universe. Therefore, in the simplest, most familiar sights and sounds, it finds bodings and shadowings-forth of things unseen, unheard. But, even with the aid of the boldest symbolism of language, the mystic feels himself still more helpless and inarticulate than we all feel when we try to express our exact and inmost meaning. In the ordinary process of thinking, we start from a comparatively simple foundation, upon which we build higher and higher, refinement upon refinement, until we reach the furthest limits of coherent thought.