These, then, seem essential factors in the readjustment which the mystics call purgation. We go on to their next stage, the so-called “way of illumination.” Here, says Dionysius, the mind is kindled by contemplation to the burning of love. There is a mental and an emotional enhancement, whereby the self apprehends the reality it has sought; whether under the veils of religion, philosophy, or nature-mysticism. Many mystics have made clear statements about this phase in human transcendence. Thus the Upanishads invite us to “know everything in the Universe as enveloped in God.” “When the purified seeker,” says Plato, “comes to the end, he will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty.... Beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting.” His follower Plotinus says that by spiritual intuition man, “wrought into harmony with the Supreme,” enters into communion with _Nous_, the “intelligible world” of eternal realities—that splendour yonder which is his home: and further that this light, shining upon the soul, enlightens it, makes it a member of the spiritual order, and so “transforms the furnace of this world into a garden of flowers.” Ruysbroeck declares that this eternal world “is not God, but it is the light in which we see Him.” Jacopone da Todi says that the self, achieving the crystalline heaven, “feels itself to be a part of all things,” because it has annihilated its separate will and is conformed to the movement of the Divine Life. Kabir says: “The middle region of the sky, wherein the Spirit dwelleth, is radiant with the music of light.” Boehme calls it the “light-world proceeding from the fire-world”; and says it is the origin of that outward world in which we dwell. “This light,” he says, “shines through and through all, but is only apprehended by that which unites itself thereto.” It seems to me fairly clear that these, and many other descriptions I cannot now quote, refer to an identical state of consciousness, which might be called an experience of Eternity, but not of the Eternal One. I say “an experience,” not merely a mental perception. Contemplation, which is the traditional name for that concentrated attention in which this phase of reality is revealed, is an activity of all our powers: the heart, the will, the mind. Dionysius emphasizes the ardent love which this revelation of reality calls forth, and which is indeed a condition of our apprehension of it; for the cold gaze of the metaphysician cannot attain it, unless he be a lover and a mystic too. “By love He may be gotten and holden, by thought never,” says the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_. It is only through the mood of humble and loving receptivity in which the artist perceives beauty, that the human spirit can apprehend a reality which is greater than itself. The many declarations about noughting, poverty and “holy nothingness” refer to this. The meek and poor of spirit really are the inheritors of Eternity.