t. Ignatius
Loyola, in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from
the current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any
suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from God alone--a
criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of
thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their
emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding thought
to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might be the
work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will
directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the
work of the mind itself, whose thoughts often seem to us abrupt through
mere failure of self-observation.

Normally what is known as an "actual grace" involves both an
illustration of the mind, and an enkindling of the will; but though
supernatural, such graces are not held to be miraculous or
preternatural, or to break the usual psychological laws of cause and
effect; like the ordinary answers to prayer, they are from God's
ordinary providence in that supernatural order which permeates but does
not of itself interfere with the natural. But over and above what,
relatively to our observation, we call the "ordinary" course, there is
the extraordinary, whose interference with it is apparent, though of
course not absolute or real--since nothing can be out of harmony with
the first and highest law, which is God Himself. And to the category of
the extraordinary must be assigned such inspirations and direct
will-movements as we here speak of. [5]

Yet not altogether; for in the natural order, too, we have the
phenomenon of instinct to consider--both spiritual and animal. Giving
heredity all the credit we can for storing up accumulated experience in
the nervous system of each species, there remains a host of fundamental
animal instincts which that law is quite inadequate to explain; those,
for example, which govern the multiplication of the species and secure
the conditions under which alone heredity can work. Such cannot be at
once the effect and the essential condition of heredity; and yet they
are, of all instincts, the most complex and mysterious. Indeed, it seems
more scientific to ascribe other instincts to the same known and
indubitable, if mysterious, cause, than to seek explanation in causes
less known and more hypothetical. In the case of many instincts, it
would seem that the craving