This deeper experience--which is the basis of Franck's mysticism and, for him, the very heart of any genuine religion--consists of a personal discovery of this eternal Word of God within and an irradiation of the whole being through the co-operation of the will with it. The will is king in man,[21] and can open or shut the gate which leads to life. It can make its world good or it {57} can make it evil; just as out of one and the same flower the bee gets honey and the spider poison.[22] It can swing over its allegiance to God the Spirit of truth, or to the god of the world who is anti-Christ. This experience of the Word of God which is thus brought about by the will of man--by an innermost personal choice--affects, Franck insists, all the faculties of the inner life. Reason now becomes illumined with a Light which it never had until the gate into its deeper region was opened. Now, through co-operation with the Spirit of God, reason becomes capable of higher processes, and can deal with divine things because it has actual _data_ to work upon. The emotions, too, are no longer blind and instinctive, they no longer carry the will whither it would not. They are now the overflow of an inner experience which is too rich and full for expression,[23] which transcends the intellectual apprehension of it, but they are spiritualized and controlled from within. The moral life is especially heightened, and this is for Franck one of the main evidences that a divine source has been tapped. The discovery of the Word of God creates and constructs an autonomous "kingdom of the conscience" ("Reich des Gewissens"), gives us "a thousand-fold witness of God," and becomes to us the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.[24] In his little book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"--a book which was destined to have a far-reaching influence--he declares that the Garden-of-Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. All that is told in the Genesis account is told of what goes on in the mysterious realm within us. It is told as though it were an external happening, it is in reality an internal affair. The Paradise and the Fall, the Voice of God and the tempting voice of the serpent, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, are all in our own hearts as they were in the heart of Adam. Heaven and Hell are there. The one stands fully revealed in the triumphant Adam, who is Christ; the other is {58} exhibited in its awfulness in the disobedient Adam of the Fall.