usness and dictate
the order in which we arrange them, for the universe of the
natural man is strictly egocentric. We continue to name the living
creatures with all the placid assurance of Adam: and whatsoever
we call them, that is the name thereof. Unless we happen to be
artists--and then but rarely--we never know the "thing seen" in its
purity; never, from birth to death, look at it with disinterested
eyes. Our vision and understanding of it are governed by all that
we bring with us, and mix with it, to form an amalgam with
which the mind can deal. To "purify" the senses is to release
them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric
judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception.
This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for
classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish
question, "What does it mean to _me_?" learn to dip ourselves in
the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by
comprehension, but from within by self-mergence.

Richard of St. Victor has said, that the essence of all purification
is self-simplification; the doing away of the unnecessary and
unreal, the tangles and complications of consciousness: and we
must remember that when these masters of the spiritual life speak
of purity, they have in their minds no thin, abstract notion of a
rule of conduct stripped of all colour and compounded chiefly of
refusals, such as a more modern, more arid asceticism set up.
Their purity is an affirmative state; something strong, clean, and
crystalline, capable of a wholeness of adjustment to the
wholeness of a God-inhabited world. The pure soul is like a lens
from which all irrelevancies and excrescences, all the beams and
motes of egotism and prejudice, have been removed; so that it
may reflect a clear image of the one Transcendent Fact within
which all others facts are held.

"All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms."

All the details of existence, all satisfactions of the heart and
mind, are resumed within that Transcendent Fact, as all the
colours of the spectrum are included in white light: and we
possess them best by passing beyond them, by following back the
many to the One.

The "Simple Eye" of Contemplation, about which the mystic
writers say so much, is then a synthetic sense; which sees that
white light in which all colour is, without discrete