Man, who aspires by the inner movement of his will, to attain to the highest degree of human perfection, and who, by the purification of his understanding, and the acquisition of celestial virtues, puts himself in a state to receive the truth, must observe that the higher he rises in the intelligible sphere, the nearer he approaches to the unfathomable Being whose contemplation must make his happiness, the less he can communicate the knowledge of it to others; for truth, coming to him under intelligible forms more and more universalized, can never be contained in the rational or sentient forms that he might give it. Here is the point where many mystic contemplators have gone astray. As they had never adequately fathomed the triple modification of their being, and as they had not known the intimate composition of the human Quaternary, they were ignorant of the manner in which the transformation of ideas was made, as much in the ascendant progression as in the descendant progression; so that, confusing continually understanding and intelligence, and making no difference between the products of their will according as it acted in one or the other of its modifications, they often showed the opposite of what they intended to show; and instead of the seers that they might, perhaps, have been, they became visionaries. I could give a great many examples of these aberrations; but I will limit myself to a single one, because the man who furnishes it for me, immeasurably great on the side of intelligence, lacked understanding and felt keenly himself, the weakness of his reason. This man, whose audacious gaze has penetrated as far as the divine sanctuary, is a German shoemaker of obscure birth, called Jacob Boehme. The rusticity of his mind, the roughness of his character, and more than all that, the force and the number of his prejudices, render his works almost unintelligible and therefore repel the savants. But when one has the patience and talent necessary to separate the pure gold from its dross and from its alloy, one can find there things which are nowhere else. These things, which present themselves nearly always under the oddest and most absurd forms, have taken them by passing from his intelligence to his instinct, without his reason having had the force to oppose itself. This is how he artlessly expresses this transformation of ideas: “Now that I have raised myself so high, I dare not look back for fear that giddiness may seize me … for as long as I ascend, I am convinced of my impulse; but it is not the same when I turn my head and when I wish to descend; then I am troubled, I am bewildered, it seems to me that I shall fall.”[594] And in truth he fell so rapidly that he did not perceive, either the terrible disparity between his ideas and his expressions, nor the manifest contradictions into which his prejudices had drawn him.