With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that God, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created it not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency towards its _true_, happiness and _true_ self-realization--that this same God can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of some suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of virtue, gradually modify the response of our will to certain suggestions, making it more sensitive to right impulses, more obtuse to evil impulses. According to mystic theology, it is the prerogative of God to dispense with this natural method of education, and, without violating that liberty of choice (which no inclination can prejudice), to incline the rational appetite this way or that; not only in reference to some suggested object, but also without reference to any distinct object whatsoever, so that the soul should be abruptly filled with joy or sadness, with fear or hope, with desire or aversion, and yet be at a loss to determine the object of these spiritual passions. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from the current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from God alone--a criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding thought to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might be the work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the work of the mind itself, whose thoughts often seem to us abrupt through mere failure of self-observation. Normally what is known as an "actual grace" involves both an illustration of the mind, and an enkindling of the will; but though supernatural, such graces are not held to be miraculous or preternatural, or to break the usual psychological laws of cause and effect; like the ordinary answers to prayer, they are from God's ordinary providence in that supernatural order which permeates but does not of itself interfere with the natural. But over and above what, relatively to our observation, we call the "ordinary" course, there is the extraordinary, whose interference with it is apparent, though of course not absolute or real--since nothing can be out of harmony with the first and highest law, which is God Himself. And to the category of the extraordinary must be assigned such inspirations and direct will-movements as we here speak of. [5]