Intuitive or infused contemplation is the form of communion with the Transcendent proper to those who have grown up to the state of Union; and feel and know the presence of God within the soul, as a love, a life, an ‘indrawing attraction,’ calling and enticing all things to the still unachieved consummation of the Divine Unity. He who has reached this pitch of introversion, and is able, in his spiritual exercises, to withdraw himself thus to the most secret part of his spirit, feels—within the Eternal Light which fills his mirror and is ‘united with it,’—this perpetual demand of the Divine Unity, entreating and urging him towards a total self-loss. In the fact that he knows this demand and impulsion as other than himself, we find the mark which separates this, the highest contemplation proper to the Life of Union, from that ‘fruitive contemplation’ of the spirit which has died into God which belongs to the Life of Unity.[65] When the work of transmutation is finished and he has received the ‘Sparkling Stone of Divine Humanity,’ this subject-object distinction—though really an eternal one, as Ruysbroeck continually reminds us—will no longer be possible to his consciousness. Then he will live at those levels to which he now makes impassioned ascents in his hours of unitive prayer: will be immersed in the Beatific Vision on which he now looks, and ‘lose himself in the Imageless Nudity.’ This is the clue to the puzzling distinction made by Ruysbroeck between the contemplation which is ‘without conditions,’ and that which is ‘beyond and above conditions’ and belongs to the Superessential Life alone. In Intuitive Contemplation the seeing self apprehends the Unconditioned World, _Onwise_, and makes ‘loving ascents thereto.’ It ‘finds within itself the unwalled’; yet is still anchored to the conditioned sphere. In Superessential Contemplation, it _dies into_ that ‘world which is in no wise.’ In the great chapter of _The Sparkling Stone_[66] where he struggles to make this distinction clear, Ruysbroeck says that the Friends of God (_i.e._ the Interior Men) “cannot with themselves and all their works penetrate to that Imageless Nudity.” Although they feel united with God, yet they feel in that union an otherness and difference between themselves and God; and therefore “the ascent into the Nought is unknown to them.” They feel themselves carried up towards God in the tide of His all-subduing Fire of Love; but they retain their selfhood, and may not be consumed and burned to nothing in the Unity of Love. They do not yet desire to die into God, that they may receive a deiform life from Him; but they are in the way which leads to this fulfilment of their destiny, and are “following back the light to its Origin.”