As the primary interest of the Active Life was ethical purification, so the primary interest of this Second Life is intellectual purification. Intellect, however, is here to be understood in its highest sense; as including not only the analytic reason which deals with the problems of our normal universe, but that higher intelligence, that contemplative mind, which—once it is awakened to consciousness—can gather news of the transcendental world. The development and clarification of this power is only possible to those who have achieved, and continue to live at full stretch, the high, arduous and unselfish life of Christian virtue. Again we must remind ourselves that Ruysbroeck’s theory of transcendence involves, not the passage from one life to another, but the _adding_ of one life to another: the perpetual deepening, widening, heightening and enriching of human experience. As the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_ insists that none can be truly contemplative who is not also active, so Ruysbroeck says that no man ever rises above the ordinary obligations of Christian kindness and active good works. “We find nowadays many silly men who would be so interior and so detached, that they will not be active or helpful in any way of which their neighbours are in need. Know, such men are neither hidden friends nor yet true servants of God, but are wholly false and disloyal; for none can follow His counsels but those who obey His laws.”[35] Nevertheless it would be generally true to say that, whilst the aim of the Active Life is right conduct, the aim of the Interior Life is right vision and thought. As, in that first life, all the perversions of man’s ordinary powers and passions were rectified, all that was superfluous and unreal done away, and his nature set right with God; now—still holding and living in its fulness this purified active life—he is to press deeper and deeper into the resources of his being, finding there other powers and cravings which must be brought within the field of consciousness, and set up those relations with the Transcendent of which they are capable. This deepening and enlarging of man’s universe, together with the further and more drastic discarding of illusions and unrealities, is the business of the Second Life, considered on its impersonal side.