lling, all hesitations between
the indrawing and outflowing instincts of the soul, shall be
checked and resolved. You are to _push_ with all your power: not
to absorb ideas, but to pour forth will and love. With this
"conative act," as the psychologists would call it, the true
contemplative life begins. Contemplation, you see, has no very
close connection with dreaminess and idle musing: it is more like
the intense effort of vision, the passionate and self-forgetful act
of communion, presupposed in all creative art. It is, says one old
English mystic, "a blind intent stretching . . . a privy love
pressed" in the direction of Ultimate Beauty, athwart all the
checks, hindrances, and contradictions of the restless world: a
"loving stretching out" towards Reality, says the great
Ruysbroeck, than whom none has gone further on this path.
Tension, ardour, are of its essence: it demands the perpetual
exercise of industry and courage.

We observe in such definitions as these a strange neglect of that
glory of man, the Pure Intellect, with which the spiritual prig
enjoys to believe that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. It
almost seems as though the mystics shared Keats' view of the
supremacy of feeling over thought; and reached out towards
some new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards new
and more accurate ideas. They are ever eager to assure us that
man's most sublime thoughts of the Transcendent are but a little
better than his worst: that loving intuition is the only certain
guide. "By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought
never."

Yet here you are not to fall into the clumsy error of supposing
that the things which are beyond the grasp of reason are
necessarily unreasonable things. Immediate feeling, so far as it is
true, does not oppose but transcends and completes the highest
results of thought. It contains within itself the sum of all the
processes through which thought would pass in the act of
attaining the same goal: supposing thought to have reached--as it
has not--the high pitch at which it was capable of thinking its way
all along this road.

In the preliminary act of gathering yourself together, and in those
unremitting explorations through which you came to "a knowing
and a feeling of yourself as you are," thought assuredly had its
place. There the powers of analysis, criticism, and deduction
found work that they could do. But now it is the love and will--
the feeling, the inte