gives no apparent scope to the intimate feeling which plays so large a part in Christian devotion. But the reality and warmth of the true mystical passion for the Absolute—its complete independence of anthropomorphic conceptions—is strikingly demonstrated by those glowing passages in which Plotinus allows his overpowering emotion, “that veritable love, that sharp desire,” to speak; and appeals to the experience of those fellow-mystics who have attained the vision of “the splendour yonder, and felt the burning of the flame of love for that which is there to know; the passion of the lover resting on the bosom of his love” (VI. 9. 4). This passion is the instrument of that ecstasy in which he taught that those men who have “wrought themselves into harmony with the Supreme” may briefly experience the vision of the ineffable One. In it the spirit is burned to a white heat, which fuses in one single state the highest activities of feeling, thought, and will. Though the doctrine of ecstasy appears in Philo, and could reasonably be deduced from Plato himself, its treatment by Plotinus, the intense actuality and poetic fervour of its presentation, are the obvious results of such personal experiences as Porphyry describes to us. This ecstasy, according to him—and here he is supported by the majority of later mystics—is not a merely passive state, nor does it result in a barren satisfaction. When, withdrawing from all lesser interests, the soul passes beyond all contingency “through virtue to the Divine Mind, through wisdom to the Supreme,” and poises itself upon God in a simple state of rapt attention, it receives as a reward of its effort not only the beatific vision of the Perfect, but also an accession of vitality. At this moment, says Plotinus, it “has another life” and “knows that the Supplier of true life is present.” The mystic, or “sage,” is not a spiritual freak; but the man who has grown up to the full stature of humanity and united himself with that Source of life which is “present everywhere, yet absent except only to those prepared to receive it” (VI. 9. 4). Therefore he alone can be trusted to be fully active; since his action is not a mere restless striving after the discordant objects of a scattered attention, but an ordered movement based on the contemplation of Reality. “We always move round the One. If we did not, we should be dissolved and no longer exist. But we do not always look at the One. When we do, we attain the end of our existence, and our rest; and no longer sing out of tune, but form a divine chorus round the One” (VI. 9. 7).