Such is Ruysbroeck’s view of contemplation. This being so, introversion is for him an essential part of man’s spiritual development. As the Son knows the Father, so it is the destiny of all spirits created in that Pattern to know Him; and the mirror which is able to reflect that Divine Light, the Simple Eye which alone can bear to gaze on it, lies in the deeps of human personality. The will, usually harnessed to the surface-consciousness, devoted to the interests of temporal life; the love, so freely spent on unreal and imperfect objects of desire; the thought which busies itself on the ceaseless analysis and arrangement of passing things—all these are to be swept inwards to that gathering-point of personality, that Unity of the Spirit, of which he so often speaks; and there fused into a single state of enormously enhanced consciousness, which, withdrawn from all attention to the changeful world of ‘similitudes,’ is exposed to the direct action of the Eternal World of spiritual realities. The pull of Divine Love—the light that ever flows back into the One—is to withdraw the contemplative’s consciousness from multiplicity to unity. His progress in contemplation will be a progress towards that complete mono-ideism in which the Vision of God—and here _vision_ is to be understood in its deepest sense as a totality of apprehension, a ‘ghostly sight’—dominates the field of consciousness to the exclusion, for the time of contemplation, of all else. Psychologically, Ruysbroeck’s method differs little from that described by St. Teresa. It begins in recollection, the first drawing inwards of attention from the world of sense; passes to meditation, the centring of attention on some intellectual formula or mystery of faith; and thence, by way of graduated states, variously divided and described in his different works, to contemplation proper, the apprehension of God ‘beyond and above reason.’ All attempts, however, to map out this process, or reduce it to a system, must necessarily have an arbitrary and symbolic character. True, we are bound to adopt some system, if we describe it at all; but the dangers and limitations of all formulas, all concrete imagery, where we are dealing with the fluid, living, changeful world of spirit, should never be absent from our minds. The bewildering and often inconsistent series of images and numbers, arrangements and rearrangements of ‘degrees,’ ‘states,’ ‘stirrings,’ and ‘gifts,’ in which Ruysbroeck’s sublime teachings on contemplation are buried, makes the choice of some one formula imperative for us; though none will reduce his doctrines to a logical series, for he is perpetually passing over from the dialectic to the lyrical mood, and forgets to be orderly as soon as he begins to be subjective. I choose, then, to base my classification on that great chapter (xix.) in _The Seven Cloisters_, where he distinguishes three stages of contemplation; finding in them the