“Could reality,” he observes in a celebrated passage, “come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves—then, we should all be artists.... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original. All this is around and within us: yet none of it is distinctly perceived by us. Between nature and ourselves—more, between ourselves and our own consciousness—hangs a veil: a veil dense and opaque for normal men, but thin, almost transparent, for the artist and poet.” He might have added, for the mystic too. This veil, he says again, is woven of self-interest: we perceive things, not as they are, but as they affect ourselves. The artist, on the contrary, sees them for their own sakes, with the eyes of disinterested love. So, when the mystics declare to us that the first conditions of spiritual illumination are self-simplification, humility and detachment, they are demanding just those qualities which control the artist’s power of seeing things in their beauty and truth. The true mystic sees Reality in its infinite aspect; and tries, as other artists, to reveal it within the finite world. He not only ascends, but descends the ladder of contemplation; having heard “the uninterrupted music of the inner life,” he tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand. Bergson’s contemporary, Eucken, claims—and I think it is one of his most striking doctrines—that man is gradually but actually bringing into existence a spiritual world. This spiritual world springs up from within through humanity—that is, through man’s own consciousness—yet at the same time humanity is, as it were, growing up into it; finding it as an independent reality, waiting to be apprehended, waiting to be incorporated into our universe. In respect of man’s normal universe, this spiritual world is both immanent and transcendent: “Absent only from those unable to perceive it,” as Plotinus said of the _Nous_. We are reminded of the Voice which said to St. Augustine, “I am the Food of the Full-grown.”