Palestrina himself suggests the answer to such questions. “The sharper blame, therefore,” he writes, “do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing.” This setting in antithesis of “men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil,” with the attribution of a “great and splendid gift” to a God conceived as remote from men though beneficent to them, exemplifies the essence of that mediæval view of life which we wish to understand, and for which perhaps the best single name is mysticism. The mystic begins his philosophy with a sharp sundering of himself, considered as an individual existing in time and space, with earthly body, finite mind, and human passions, from what he considers supreme, formless, and eternal good. In common with other men, he has his instinctive perceptions of the divine; but unlike other men he cuts off very sharply the divine thus perceived from the real world in which he eats and drinks, works and plays, lives and dies. His is a world of strong contrasts, of extreme antithesis--the world that mystical terminology divides into “apparent and real,” “divine and carnal,” “temporal and eternal.” His intuition of what is beyond the veil of mortality, absolute, permanent, serves only to emphasize more poignantly his own frailty, partiality, and transience. He not only hypostatizes his own ideal, his dream and aspiration of what ought to be, making of it, as all men do, a real objective existence, but he then cuts it off from himself, makes it a touchstone of all the dross that in him exists alongside the pure gold, and while he attributes all virtue to this “other” or “beyond” projected by his unconscious imagination, reserves to his present actual self, as directly known, all wickedness, sin, and failure. God is perfect, but remote; man is near--and base.