and enticing us: the unspeakably simple
because completely inclusive solution of all the puzzles of life.

As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet actual reality of
the natural world, in order that it might give itself to you, and
your possession of its secret was achieved, first by surrender of
selfhood, next by a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last by
a union of love; so now by a repetition upon fresh levels of that
same process, you are to mount up to higher unions still. Held
tight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetual
rhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of "natural" life--compelled
to pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die--there is yet,
as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, something
in you which endures through and therefore transcends this world
of change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and
merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one
intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of--an
instinct for--another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as
yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the
Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning
mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can,
is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the true origin of all
your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of your
heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentative
efforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of
devotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some total
self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little
activity can be merged.

St. Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only withheld from this
desired vision of the Divine Essence, this discovery of the
Pure Act (which indeed is everywhere pressing in on him and
supporting him), by the apparent necessity which he is under of
turning to bodily images, of breaking up his continuous and
living intuition into Conceptual scraps; in other words, because
he cannot live the life of sensation without thought. But it is not
the man, it is merely his mental machinery which is under this
"necessity." This it is which translates, analyses, incorporates in
finite images the boundless perceptions of the spirit: passing
through its prism the White Light of Reality, and shattering it to a
succession of coloured rays. Therefore t