So we may say that an enhancement of the conative powers, a greater control over the attention, are the chief marks of the Illuminative Way as perceived by the growing self. But the liberty here spoken of has a moral as well as a mental aspect. It is a freeing of the whole man from the fetters of illusion, and involves that perfect detachment of heart, that self-naughting, which makes him equally willing to have joy or pain, gain or loss, esteem or contempt, peace or fear, as the Divine Will may ordain. Thus is perfected that suppleness of soul which he began to acquire in the Active Life: a gradual process, which needs for its accomplishment the negative rhythm of renunciation, testing the manliness and courage of the self, as well as the positive movement of love. Hence the Contemplative Life, as Ruysbroeck knows and describes it, has, and must have, its state of pain as well as its state of joy. With him, however, as with nearly all the mystics, the state of joy comes first: the glad and eager reaction to those new levels of spiritual reality disclosed to consciousness when the struggles and readjustments of the Active Life have done their work. This is the phase in the self’s progress which mystical writers properly mean by Illumination: a condition of great happiness, and of an intuition of Reality so vivid and joyous, that the soul often supposes that she has here reached the goal of her quest. It is in the spiritual year, says Ruysbroeck, that which the month of May is in the seasons of the earth: a wholesome and necessary time of sunshine, swift growth and abundant flowers, when the soul, under the influence of ‘the soft rain of inward consolations and the heavenly dew of the Divine sweetness’ blossoms in new and lovely graces.