Now, assuming the Thomistic doctrine of the origin of ideas and the specific nature of human cognition to be true, it is worthy of careful inquiry how the statements of mystical authors respecting infused contemplation are to be explained in accordance with this system. We cannot prudently assume that there is a repugnance between them. Practically, St. Thomas was one of those saints who have made the highest attainments in mystic contemplation. He is the “Angelical,” and the history of his life shows that he was frequently, and towards the close of his life almost habitually, rapt out of the common sphere of the senses, so as to take no notice of what went on before his eyes or was uttered in his hearing. His last act as an instructor in divine wisdom was an exposition of the Canticle of Solomon to the monks of Fossa Nuova, and he could no doubt have explained according to his own philosophical doctrine all the facts and phenomena of mystic contemplation, so far as these can be represented in human language. There cannot be any sufficient reason, therefore, to regard the two as dissonant or as demanding either one any sacrifice of the other. In respect to the purely passive and supernatural contemplation, there seems, indeed, to be no difficulty whatsoever in the way. There is no question of an immediate intuition of the divine essence in this ecstatic state, so that, even if the soul is supposed to be raised for a time to an equality with angels in its intellectual acts, the errors of false mysticism and ontologism are excluded from the hypothesis. For even the angels have no such natural intuition. That the human intellect should receive immediately from angels or from God infused species or ideas by which it becomes cognizant of realities behind the veil of the sensible, and contemplates God through a more perfect glass than that of discursive reason, does not in any way interfere with the psychology of scholastic metaphysics. For the cause and mode are professedly supernatural. In the human intellect of our Lord, the perfection of infused and acquired knowledge, the beatific vision and the natural sensitive life common to all men co-existed in perfect harmony. It is even probable that Moses, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Paul enjoyed temporary glimpses of the beatific vision. Therefore, although it is true that, without a miracle, no mere man “can see God and live,” and that the ecstasies of the saints, in which there is no intuitive vision of the divine essence, but only a manifestation of divine things, naturally tend to extinguish bodily life, yet, by the power of God, the operations of the natural life can be sustained in conjunction with those which are supernatural, because they are not essentially incongruous. The only question is one of fact and evidence. Whatever may be proved to take place in souls so highly elevated, philosophy has no objection to offer; for these things are above the sphere of merely human and rational science.