There remains the great pair of opposites, fundamental for his thought, called in the Flemish vernacular _Wise_ and _Onwise_, and generally rendered by translators as ‘Mode’ and ‘Modeless.’ Wherever possible I have replaced these tasteless Latinisms by the Old English equivalents ‘in some wise’ and ‘in no wise,’ occasionally by ‘conditioned’ and ‘unconditioned’; though perhaps the colloquial ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’ would be yet more exactly expressive. Now this pair of opposites is psychological rather than metaphysical, and has to do with the characteristic phenomena of contemplation. It indicates the difference between the universe of the normal man, living as the servant or friend of God within the temporal order, and the universe of the true contemplative, the ‘hidden child.’ The knowledge and love of the first is a conditioned knowledge and love. Everything which happens to him happens ‘in some wise’; it has attachments within his conceptual world, is mediated to him by symbols and images which intellect can grasp. “The simple ascent into the Nude and the Unconditioned is unknown and unloved of him”; it is through and amongst his ordinary mental furniture that he obtains his contacts with Reality. But the knowledge and love of the second, his contacts, transcend the categories of thought. He has escaped alike from the tyrannies and comforts of the world of images, has made the ‘ascent into the Nought,’ where all _is_, yet ‘in no wise.’ “The power of the understanding is lifted up to that which is beyond all conditions, and its seeing is in no wise, being without manner, and it is neither thus nor thus, neither here nor there.”[24] This is the direct, unmediated world of spiritual intuition; where the self touches a Reality that has not been passed through the filters of sense and thought. There man achieves a love, a vision, an activity which are ‘wayless,’ yet far more valid than anything that can be fitted into the framework of our conditioned world. “In a place beyond uttermost place, in a track without shadow of trace, Soul and body transcending, I live in the soul of my Loved One anew.” Thus cries the great Sūfī poet, Jalālu’ddīn; and the suggestion which his words convey is perhaps as close as speech can come to what Ruysbroeck meant by _Onwise_. The change of consciousness which initiates man into this inner yet unbounded world—the world that is ‘unwalled,’ to use his own favourite metaphor—is the essence of contemplation; which consists, not in looking at strange mysteries, but in a movement to fresh levels, shut to the analytic intellect, open to adventurous love. There, without any amazement, the self can ‘know in no wise’ that which it can never understand.