English mysticism has always been a fragile growth. The nation prides itself on a tough empiricism which veers between the bone-headed and the sentimental but which has little, if any, time for the transcendent vision. One or two medieval deviants endure, the odd Blake occurs and a few pale Victorians expire in ecstasy, but, in general, the English mystics hover, decorative but impotent, in the wings.

The point is, I suppose, that, for both mystics and empiricists, it is all or nothing. Allow one breath of the divine flux into the sensory certainties and the clockwork crumbles; expose the wire in the angel’s wings and the vision dissolves into the light of ordinary day. The English invested a lot in the hard empiricism of the Industrial Revolution; they are less likely than most, therefore, to entertain the possibility that the whole thing was based on a gross misconception.

But, of course, it was – and still is. The idea that science and technology, aided by Bertrand Russell, would one day banish myth, fantasy and vision from the world was always stupid, the exact reverse, in fact, of what would happen. ‘The more enlightened our houses are,’ wrote Italo Calvino, ‘the more their walls ooze ghosts.’ Ghosts ooze even in Mr Major’s/Pooter’s Britain, and here is William Anderson, poet and historian, to tell us their names.

His book is a catalogue of ecstasy, a baggy assortment of raging enthusiasms. Here are Dante; Goethe; Blake, of course; August Kekule, who discovered the benzene ring by dreaming of a snake biting its own tail; Orpingalik, the Eskimo poet; and Egil Skallagrimsson, the Viking bard who captured the miseries of old age forever with the line, ‘My cock’s gone cold and clammy’.

There are hundreds more. Anderson’s first impulse with this book was clearly to use it as a repository for his vast collection of stories, poems, insights, intuitions and memories, all framed by sudden moments of personal experience. ‘It is New Year’s Eve on the edge of the desert of Thar in Rajasthan,’ begins one chapter. ‘The view to the downs is arched by two trees, a deciduous ash and an evergreen ilex,’ begins another.

The individual elements of this collection range from the fascinating, through the weird to the banal. Anderson tells stories well, and his critical assessments are usually convincing. His whole manner of engagement with his material is attractive, perhaps because he does not simply want to add to the mountain of commentary on Dante or Rembrandt, but rather because he wants to do something with these artists; he wants to make them work. Occasionally this all collapses and he stumbles into hopeless banalities – a passage on the differences between the visual arts and the rest sticks in the mind. But, on the whole, one reads The Face of Glory with the reassuring feeling that something is going on.

But what, exactly? This is not easy. The problem is that Anderson’s desire to get down his private catalogue is clearly stronger than his desire to join the elements into a coherent whole. His chapters seem clearly defined and the book appears to be organised around a single argument, but one reads it more as an impressionistic evocation. The apparent thread of argument is too slender to make complete sense of the huge burden of detail. Instead, there is a feeling of one simple and very general point being repeatedly decorated and enhanced. The book does not move towards but rather circles around its subject.

Anderson himself defines this subject as the Face of Glory: ‘The face is that of a man or of a man with the mouth of a lion, with fierce bulbous eyes and with vegetation pouring out of the sides of his mouth with a mane of leaves and flowers!’ This is his version of the more or less universal mystical image of a union of man and nature. The image is ancient, but especially poignant now. Clearly environmentalism has made mankind feel alienated from nature, a destroyer of a world in which he does not seem to make any kind of natural sense. But, also, the four hundred years of the scientific revolution have convinced us that this alienation is the only viable option. We are all Cartesians now, if only because it seems to make us richer.

Anderson is very pro-science, but he is uneasy with it: ‘it cannot account for consciousness,’ he writes, ‘inspiration, memory or enjoyment’. And it produces absurdities. He notes the odd transcendentalism of the most hard-headed of scientists as well as the ego-suppressive effects of the Internet. ‘It is interesting to note that materialist scientists should regard as the ultimate goal of their science the imperative to create a supreme intelligence into which they will be merged, in other words to make the transcendent deity with which they can experience the unity that they have been unable to find through their researches into microcosms and macrocosms.’

This is a familiar but profound point – the categories and objects of human belief may change, but its aspiration remains the same. The Internet is a desire to escape from the body as mad or as sane, depending on your perspective, as the rapture of St Teresa. To the mystic, this is evidence of the continuity of human experience through the ages, of the extratemporal quality of the real sense of being and of the transcendentally consoling way we can feel at one with everybody who has ever lived.

It is clear that the modern world lacks this sense of unity, clear, indeed, that most of the time it finds the idea ridiculous. Tell the computer nerd that the Internet is his version of the Jungian pleroma and he will laugh in your face. He does not want it to be a version of anything because that would suggest it was not new, and novelty is all he really cares about. For him, the Internet is a communion of fragments, not an image of the whole.

Anderson, however, is an optimist. The nerd would not upset him. Rather he would see him as a precursor of a new age, an era in which we shall see ‘a transformation of human mental powers that will be even greater in its expansion of thought and creative abilities than the discovery of the powers of the mind that took place in Asia and Europe in the sixth and fifth centuries BC’. Part of this transformation will be the development of a science of consciousness – ‘a leap to the conception of studying it as a universal and unified noumenon rather than as the adventitious product of electrical discharges in separate human brains’.

Some scientists, not mentioned by Anderson, are already doing something like this and many thinkers, mystics and others are trying to understand the peculiar deficiencies of our contemporary culture. One way or another, the sense that we have fallen from grace, that the explanations officially on offer are inadequate, is pervasive. Anderson’s book amounts to a commentary on, rather than an argument towards, this state of affairs. It is, alternately, admirable and infuriating. Its prose isn’t quite up to its material and its form frequently conceals the power of its primary insights. But, as a catalogue of the ghosts that ooze from our walls, it is essential.