Walter Terence Stace (17 November 1886 – 2 August 1967) was a British civil servant, educator, public philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, mysticism, and moral relativism.

These works have been influential in the study of mysticism, but they have also been severely criticised for their lack of methodological rigor and their perennialist pre-assumptions.

He was a son of Major Edward Vincent Stace (3 September 1841 – 6 May 1903) (of the Royal Artillery) and Amy Mary Watson (1856 - 29 March 1934), who were married on 21 December 1872 in Poona (Pune), India.

Walter's great-grandfather William Stace (1755 - 31 May 1839) was Chief Commissary (Commissary-General) of the Royal Artillery during the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815).

George Augustus Frederick Watson (1821-1897) and Elizabeth Mary Williams, who were married on 15 June 1852 in St. James' Church, Paddington, London.

He held several positions in the Ceylonese government, including District Judge (1919-1920) and Mayor of Colombo (1931-1932), the capital city of Ceylon.

It was during his period in Ceylon that he developed an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism, religions which were to influence his subsequent studies of mysticism.

The LittD degree, and the 4 books he had published while an employee of the Ceylon Civil Service, proved to be the keys to his entry into a new career.

Richard Marius attributed his loss of faith partly to his intellectual engagement with Stace's essay Man Against Darkness.

His work in the 1930s and 40s bears a strong influence of phenomenalism, a form of radical empiricism (not to be confused with phenomenology, which examines the structure and content of consciousness).

Concern with divine purpose of events had been replaced by investigation into what had caused them; the new imaginative picture of the world was dominated by the idea that life is purposeless and meaningless.

Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.In the spring of 1949, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a forum called "The Social Implications of Scientific Progress—an Appraisal at Mid-Century.

Stace took part in a discussion called 'Science, Materialism and the Human Spirit' alongside J. Seelye Bixler (1894-1985), Percy W. Bridgman and Jacques Maritain.

[13] In 1954, he gave the annual Howison Lecture in Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, where he spoke on "Mysticism and Human Reason".

[7][note 1] Stace's philosophy of mysticism grew out of his earlier empiricist epistemology, although this is something many critics of his position fail to appreciate.

The given has an important epistemological function because it possesses the properties of certainty (infallibility, incorrigibility, indubitability), and it provides the ultimate justification for all forms of human knowledge.

Each examined the struggle between the religious worldview and those of science and of naturalism, which he had begun to explore in his essays Man Against Darkness and The Need for a Secular Ethic in the 1940s.

Religion and the Modern Mind is divided into three sections, the first of these looks at the medieval "world-picture" which Stace characterises as marked by a religious, moral and purposeful view of existence.

The second section looks at the modern world, which is characterised by the rise of science and naturalism (although Stace denies that the latter logically follows from the former), and the Romantic reaction to this.

Stace examines religious truth and its expression, and concludes that the latter necessarily takes symbolic form in much the same way as he does in Time and Eternity.

He also roots morality in both utilitarian considerations and in mysticism, which together fuse into "a single homogeneous set of ideal ends".

In his prefatory note Stace explains that he wrote the book four years previously and that it "records the phase of intellectual and emotional experience through which the writer was passing at the time.

"[26] In addition to the symbolic nature of all religious expression, the book proposes the existence of two realms of being, time and eternity, which intersect but do not contradict each other.

[33] In the former he states that the psychology of mysticism must rely on introspection, because it is the only method that is available to investigate the phenomenon, despite it being difficult to verify (unlike the inspection of physical events).

Like William James, he distinguishes between ordinary and mystical consciousness; the former he describes as sensory-intellectual, while the latter contains neither sensory nor intellectual content.

Again he turns to the Mandukya Upanishad for his definition of mysticism, and identifies the realisation the personal self is identical with the infinite Self at the core of the experience.

[39] Although Stace's work on mysticism received a positive response, it has also been criticised in the 1970s and 1980s, for its lack of methodological rigour and its perennialist pre-assumptions.

[40][41][42][43][web 1] Major criticism came from Steven T. Katz in his influential series of publications on mysticism and philosophy,[note 4] and from Wayne Proudfoot in his Religious experience (1985).

[47][note 6] According to Moore, Stace also thinks too lightly about the relation between experience and language, supposing that descriptions are phenomenologically straightforward and reliable.

"[56] According to Katz (1978), Stace's typology is "too reductive and inflexible," reducing the complexities and varieties of mystical experience into "improper categories.