So we may place the attitude of selfless adoration, the single-hearted passion of the soul, among the essentials of the mystic in the illuminated way. A very wide range of mystical experiences must be attributed to this second stage in man’s spiritual growth. Some at least of its secrets are known to all who are capable of æsthetic passion; who, in the presence of beauty, know themselves to stand upon the fringe of another plane of being, where the elements of common life are given new colour and value, and its apparent disharmonies are resolved. So, too, that deep sense of a divine companionship which many ardent souls achieve in prayer is a true if transitory experience of illumination. We shall probably be right in assuming that the enormous majority of mystics never get beyond this level of consciousness. Certainly a large number of religious writers on mysticism attribute to its higher and more personal manifestations the names of “divine union” and “unitive life”; thereby adding to the difficulty of classifying spiritual states, and showing themselves unaware of the great distinction which such full-grown mystics as Plotinus, Jacopone da Todi or Ruysbroeck describe as existing between this “middle heaven” and the ecstatic vision of the One which alone really satisfies their thirst for truth. Thus Jacopone at first uses the strongest unitive language to describe that rapturous and emotional intercourse with Divine Love which characterized his middle period; but when he at last achieves the vision of the Absolute, he confesses that he was in error in supposing that it was indeed the Truth Whom he thus saw and worshipped under veils. “Or, parme, fo fallanza, non se’ quel che credea, tenendo non avea vertá senza errore.” Thus Ruysbroeck attributes to the contemplative life, “the inward and upward-going ways by which one may pass into the Presence of God,” but distinguishes these from that super-essential life wherein “we are swallowed up, beyond reason and above reason, in the deep quiet of the Godhead which is never moved.” All the personal raptures of devotional mysticism, all the nature-mystic’s joyous consciousness of God in creation, Blake’s “world of imagination and vision,” the “coloured land” of Æ., the Sūfi’s “tavern on the way,” where he is refreshed by a draught of supersensual wine, belong to the way of illumination. For the Christian mystic the world into which it inducts him is, pre-eminently, the sphere of the divine Logos-Christ, fount of creation and source of all beauty; the hidden Steersman who guides and upholds the phenomenal world: “Splendor che dona a tutto ’l mondo luce, amor, Iesú, de li angeli belleza, cielo e terra per te si conduce e splende in tutte cose tua fattezza.”