Being now able to please himself, he attacked the Platonists--not only Plato himself, but Plotinus and his followers--and gradually he was led to doubt the serious value of mere knowledge. Down into the valley of humiliation he stept; in the bitterness of the fruit of the intellect he could presume to believe, for he had tasted of it and strenuously bruised the savour from it,--and he came to see that it is not the origin and method of life, but life itself that it behoves the true man to know. That was the point at which so many of his contemporaries were stopping all round him; they, too, had penetrated the secrets of the mind. A few of them, more enthusiastic, continued to pursue it: the others, mistaking the sensuous region for the higher way, fell back on life in its grosser forms; they ate and drank, they buried themselves in local politics and temporary interests. Such things had no charm for More; he pushed through and out into a purer air. The mysterious and fascinating doctrine of the divine illumination opened before him--uncleanness of spirit, not distance of place, he said, divide men from God: to purge the mind from vice and impurity and the subtle temptations of sense, so as to leave the spiritual eye clear and undimmed--this holy art of life became his dream. There fell into his hands Tauler's "Theologia Germanica," that precious treatise that, through similitudes, spoke so clearly of God; the work that had been so beloved of Luther. It spoke of the surrender of the will to God--the loosing it from selfish impulses to sail like a ship upon the free sea--the nameless but unerring instinct that falls upon the soul if such a course is faithfully pursued. He awoke like a man out of sleep, and the conflict began. The old man, which, like Proteus, assumes so many and so bewildering shapes, stood revealed: but the struggle was a matter of time, though sharp at first, so clearly was the truth grasped; and this growing purity and simplicity of mind which he discovered, together with a superhuman assurance, which began to stir and rise within him, constitute what may be called his conversion. Another quatrain records this: I come from Heaven, am an immortal ray Of God; O joy! and back to God shall go. And here sweet love on wings me up doth stay. I live, I'm sure; and joy this life to know. Night and vain dreams begone--Father of lights, We live, as Thou, clad with eternal day. Faith, wisdom, love, fixed joy, free winged might-- This is true life: all else death and decay. He wrote also to record this a long mystical poem, called _Psychozoia_ (Life of the Soul), in 1640, at the age of twenty-six. He was flooded with a perpetual content.