summit of a rock, perceives with his eyes objects which are invisible to those who have not made the ascent along with him.” But although all beings, from the stone and the plant up to man, are contemplations, they are unconscious contemplations; and it is very difficult to rediscover in ourselves some memory of the previous activity of the dead faculty. In this respect we resemble the eye in the Neo-Platonic image. “It turns away from the light to see the darkness, and by the very action it ceases to see; for it cannot see the darkness with the light, and yet without it, it sees not at all; and so, by not seeing, it sees the darkness as far as it is capable of seeing it.” I know the judgment which most men will pronounce on this book. They will think it the work of a deluded monk, of a pale solitary, a hermit, dizzy with fasting and worn with fever. They will take it for a wild, dark dream, crossed with vivid lightning flashes,--nothing more. This is the common idea which people form of the mystics; and they forget too often that they alone are the possessors of certainty. If it be true, as has been said, that every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams, we might well ask whether every man is not in this life an inarticulate mystic, a thousand times more transcendental than those who have confined themselves within the bonds of words. Is not the eye of the lover or of the mother, for instance, a thousand times more abstruse, more impenetrable, and more mystical than this book, which is poor and easily explained, after all, like all books, for these are but dead mysteries, whose horizon will never be rekindled? If we do not understand this, perhaps the reason is that we no longer understand anything. But, to return to our author, a few will recognise without difficulty that, far from being half-maddened by hunger, solitude, and fever, this monk possessed, on the contrary, one of the wisest, most exact, and most subtle philosophic brains which have ever existed. He lived, they tell us, in his hut at Grönendal, in the midst of the forest of Soignes. It was at the beginning of one of the wildest centuries of the middle ages,--the fourteenth. He knew no Greek, and perhaps no Latin. He was alone and poor; and yet, in the depths of this obscure forest of Brabant, his mind, ignorant and simple as it was, receives, all unconsciously, dazzling sunbeams from all the lonely, mysterious peaks of human thought He knows, though he is unaware of it, the Platonism of Greece, the Sufism of Persia, the Brahmanism of India, and the Buddhism of Tibet; and his marvellous ignorance rediscovers the wisdom of buried centuries, and foresees the knowledge of centuries yet unborn. I could quote whole pages of Plato, of Plotinus, of Porphyry, of the Zendic books, of the Gnostics, and of the Kabbala, the all but inspired substance of which is to be found intact in the writings of this humble Flemish priest.[1] We find strange coincidences and disturbing agreements.