The illumination brought about through the inner sense is, according to Eckhart’s view, the entrance of God into the soul. The light of knowledge which flames up through this entrance, he calls the “little spark of the soul.” The point in man’s inner being at which this “spark” flames up is “so pure, so lofty, and so noble in itself, that no creature can be therein, but only God alone dwells therein with His purely Divine Nature.” Whosoever has kindled this “spark” in himself, no longer sees only as sees the ordinary man with his outer senses, and with his logical understanding which orders and classifies the impressions of the senses, but he sees how things are in themselves. The outer senses and the classifying understanding separate the individual man from other things; they make of him an individual in space and time, who also perceives the other things in space and time. The man illuminated by the “spark” ceases to be a single separated being. He annihilates his separateness. All that brings about the difference between himself and things ceases to be. That he, as a single being, is that which perceives, no longer comes into consideration. Things and he himself are no longer separated. Things, and with them, God, see themselves in him. “This spark is in very deed God, in that it is a single oneness and bears within it the imagery of all creatures, image without image, and image upon image.” Eckhart proclaims in the most magnificent words the extinction of the isolated being: “It is therefore to be known, that according to things it is one and the same to know God and to be known by God. Therein do we know God and see, that He makes us to see and to know. And as the air, which enlighteneth, is nothing other than what it enlightens; for the air giveth light, because it is enlightened; even so do we know that we are known, and that He maketh us to know Himself.” On this foundation Meister Eckhart builds up his relation to God. It is a purely spiritual one, and cannot be modelled according to any image borrowed from human individual experience. Not as one separated individual loves another can God love his creation: not as an architect builds a house can God have created it. All such thoughts vanish before the inner vision. It belongs to God’s very being that He should love the world. A God who could love or not love at pleasure, is imagined according to the likeness of the individual man. “I speak in good truth and in eternal truth and in everlasting truth, that God must needs ever pour Himself forth in every man who has reached down to his true root to the utmost of possibility, so wholly and completely that in His life and in His being, in His nature and in His Godhead, He keeps nothing back; He must ever pour all forth in fruitful wise.” And the inner illumination is something that the soul must necessarily find when it sinks itself deep into the basis of its being.