if the soul in these pure operations had no use at all of the internal senses or sensible images (for the schools resolve that cannot consist with the state of a soul joined to a mortal body); but surely her operations in this pure degree of prayer are so subtile and intime, and the images that she makes use of so exquisitely pure and immaterial, that she cannot perceive at all that she works by images, so that spiritual writers are not much to be condemned by persons utterly inexperienced in these mystic affairs, if, delivering things as they perceived by their own experience, they have expressed them otherwise than will be admitted in the schools.”[36] That kind of contemplation which is treated of in mystical theology is, therefore, a state or an act of the mind in which the intellectual operation approaches to that of separate spirits――that is, of human souls separated from their bodies, and of pure spirits or angels who are, by their essence unembodied, simply intellectual beings. Its direct and chief object is God, other objects being viewed in their relation to him. The end of it is the elevation of the soul above the sphere of the senses and the sensible world into a more spiritual condition approaching the angelic, in which it is closely united with God, and prepared for the beatific and deific state of the future and eternal life. The longing after such a liberation from the natural and imperfect mode of knowing and enjoying the sovereign good, the sovereign truth, the sovereign beauty, through the senses and the discursive operations of reason, is as ancient and as universal among men as religion and philosophy. It is an aspiration after the invisible and the infinite. When it is not enlightened, directed, and controlled by a divine authority, it drives men into a kind of intellectual and spiritual madness, produces the most extravagant absurdities in thought and criminal excesses in conduct, stimulates and employs as its servants all the most cruel and base impulses of the disordered passions, and disturbs the whole course of nature. Demons are fallen angels who aspired to obtain their deification through pride, and the fall of man was brought about through an inordinate and disobedient effort of Eve to become like the gods, knowing good and evil. An inordinate striving to become like the angels assimilates man to the demons, and an inordinate striving after a similitude to God causes a relapse into a lower state of sin than that in which we are born. The history of false religions and philosophies furnishes a series of illustrations of this statement. In the circle of nominal Christianity, and even within the external communion of the Catholic Church, heretical and false systems of a similar kind have sprung up, and the opinions and writings of some who were orthodox and well-intentioned in their principles have been tinctured with such errors, or at least distorted in their verbal expression of the cognate truths.