d, they
abominate those things which are really good and sweet according to
common nature; but it is most worthy, because it is founded upon the
habit of looking at the true light; the which habit cannot come into use
for the multitude, as we have said. This blindness is heroic, and is of
such a kind that it can worthily satisfy the present heroic blind man,
who is so far from troubling himself about it that he is able to explain
every other sight, and he would crave nothing else from the community
save a free passage and progress in contemplation, for he finds himself
usually hampered and blocked by obstacles and opposition.

The fifth results from the disproportion of the means of our cognition
to the knowable; seeing that in order to contemplate Divine things, the
eyes must be opened by means of images, analogies and other reasonings
which by the Peripatetics are comprehended under the name of fancies
(fantasmi); or, by means of Being, to proceed to speculate about
Essence, by means of its effects and the knowledge of the cause; the
which means, are so far from ensuring the attainment of such an end,
that it is easier to believe that the highest and most profound
cognition of Divine things, is through negation and not through
affirmation, knowing that the Divine beauty and goodness is not that
which can or does fall within our conception, but that which is above
and beyond, incomprehensible; chiefly in that condition called by the
philosopher speculation of phantoms, and by the theologian, vision
through analogies, reflections and enigmas, because we see, not the true
effects and the true species of things, or the substance of ideas, but
the shadows, vestiges and simulacra of them, like those who are inside
the cave and have from their birth their shoulders turned away from the
entrance of the light, and their faces towards the end, where they do
not see that which is in reality, but the shadows of that which is found
substantially outside the cave. Therefore by the open vision which it
has lost, and knows it has lost, a spirit similar to or better than that
of Plato weeps, desiring exit from the cave, whence, not through
reflexion, but through immediate conversion he may see the light again.

MIN. It appears to me that this blind man does not refer to the
difficulty which proceeds from reflective vision, but to that which is
caused through the medium between the visual power and the object.

SEV. These two modes,