sublime; but he is never woolly or confused. His prose passages owe much of their seeming difficulty to the passion for exactitude which distinguishes and classifies the subtlest movements of the spiritual atmosphere, the delicately graded responses of the soul. 3. Now the Third Degree of Contemplation lifts the whole consciousness to a plane of perception which transcends the categories of the intellect: where it deals no longer with the label but with the Thing. It has passed beyond image and also beyond thought; to that knowledge by contact which is the essence of intuition, and is brought about by the higher powers of love. Such contemplation is regarded by Ruysbroeck as the work of the Father, “Who strips from the mind all forms and images and lifts up the Naked Apprehension [_i.e._ intuition] into its Origin, that is Himself.”[62] It is effected by concentration of all the powers of the self into a single state ‘uplifted above all action, in a bare understanding and love,’ upon that apex of the soul where no reason can ever attain, and where the ‘simple eye’ is ever open towards God. There the loving soul apprehends Him, not under conditions, ‘in some wise,’ but as a _whole_, without the discrete analysis of His properties which was the special character of intellectual contemplation; a synthetic experience which is ‘in no wise.’ This is for Ruysbroeck the contemplative act _par excellence_. It is ‘an intimacy which is ignorance,’ a ‘simple seeing,’ he says again and again; “and the name thereof is _Contemplatio_; that is, the seeing of God in simplicity.”[63] “Here the reason no less than all separate acts must give way, for our powers become simple in Love; they are silent and bowed down in the Presence of the Father. And this revelation of the Father lifts the soul above the reason into the Imageless Nudity. There the soul is simple, pure, spotless, empty of all things; and it is in this state of perfect emptiness that the Father manifests His Divine radiance. To this radiance neither reason nor sense, observation nor distinction, can attain. All this must stay below; for the measureless radiance blinds the eyes of the reason, they cannot bear the Incomprehensible Light. But above the reason, in the most secret part of the understanding, the _simple eye_ is ever open. It contemplates and gazes at the Light with a pure sight that is lit by the Light itself: eye to eye, mirror to mirror, image to image. This threefold act makes us like God, and unites us to Him; for the sight of the _simple eye_ is a living mirror, which God has made for His image, and whereon He has impressed it.”[64]