We come to the third stage, the true goal of mystic experience; the intuitive contact with that ultimate reality which theologians mean by the Godhead and philosophers by the Absolute, a contact in which, as Richard of St. Victor says “the soul gazes upon Truth without any veils of creatures—not in a mirror darkly, but in its pure simplicity.” The claim to this is the loftiest claim which can be made by human consciousness. There is little we can say of it, because there is little we know; save that the vision or experience is always the vision or experience of a Unity which reconciles all opposites, and fulfils all man’s highest intuitions of reality. “Be lost altogether in Brahma like an arrow that has completely penetrated its target,” say the Upanishads. This self-loss, says Dionysius the Areopagite, is the Divine Initiation: wherein we “pass beyond the topmost altitudes of the holy ascent, and leave behind all divine illumination and voices and heavenly utterances; and plunge into the darkness where truly dwells, as Scripture saith, that One Which is beyond all things.” Some recent theologians have tried to separate the conceptions of God and of the Absolute: but mystics never do this, though some of the most clear-sighted, such as Meister Eckhart, have separated that unconditioned Godhead known in ecstasy from the personal God who is the object of devotional religion, and who represents a humanization of reality. When the great mystic achieves the “still, glorious, and absolute Oneness” which finally satisfies his thirst for truth—the “point where all lines meet and show their meaning”—he generally confesses how symbolic was the object of his earlier devotion, how partial his supposed communion with the Divine. Thus Jacopone da Todi—exact and orthodox Catholic though he was—when he reached “the hidden heaven,” discovered and boldly declared the approximate character of all his previous conceptions of, and communion with God; the great extent to which subjective elements had entered into his experience. In the great ode which celebrates his ecstatic vision of Truth, when “ineffable love, imageless goodness, measureless light” at last shone in his heart, he says: “I thought I knew Thee, tasted Thee, saw Thee under image: believing I held Thee in Thy completeness I was filled with delight and unmeasured love. But _now_ I see I was mistaken—Thou art not as I thought and firmly held.” So Tauler says that compared with the warm colour and multiplicity of devotional experience, the very Godhead is a “rich nought,” a “bare pure ground”; and Ruysbroeck that it is “an unwalled world,” “neither this nor that.” “This fruition of God,” he says again, “is a still and glorious and essential Oneness beyond the differentiation of the Persons, where there is neither an outpouring nor an indrawing of God, but the Persons are still and one in fruitful love, in calm and glorious unity.... There is