The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c16.61

v4.c16.61

Akbar was by nature a mystic who sought earnestly, like his Sūfī friends, to attain the ineffable bliss of direct contact with the Divine Reality, and now and again believed, or fancied, that he had succeeded. His temperament was profoundly melancholic, and there seems to be some reason to suspect that at times he was not far from the danger of falling into a state of religious mania. His ambition and intense interest in all the affairs of this world saved him from that fate, and brought him back from dreams to the actualities of human life. He was not an ordinary man, and his complex nature, like that of St Paul, Muhammad, Dante, and other great men with a tendency to mysticism, presents perplexing problems.¹