The highest is of course, reached only by a few; for on the pinnacle of Truth there is no room for the many; but one presses forward after another, to reach the source of the knowledge of God, welling forth on its lonely height. 7. To express his view of the Human Reason, Ibn Sina employs and explains poetical traditions,—a favourite proceeding in the Persian literature. First and foremost our interest is awakened by the allegorical figure of Hai ibn Yaqzan. It represents the ascent of the Spirit out of the Elements, and through the realms of Nature, of the Souls, and of the Spirits, up to the throne of the Eternal One. Hai presents himself to the philosopher in the form of an old man with an air of youth about him, and offers his services as guide. The wanderer has been striving to reach a knowledge of Earth and Heaven, by means of his outer and inner senses. Two ways open out before him, one to the West, the way of the Material and the Evil, the other to the Rising Sun, the way of Spiritual and ever-pure Forms; and along that way Hai now conducts him. Together they reach the well of Divine wisdom, the fountain of everlasting youth, where beauty is the curtain of beauty, and light the veil of light,—the Eternal Mystery. Hai ibn Yaqzan is thus the guide of individual, thinking Souls: he is the Eternal Spirit who is over mankind, and operates in them. A similar meaning is found by our philosopher in the frequently remodelled late-Greek legend of the brothers Salaman and Absal. Salaman is the World-Man, whose wife (i.e., the World of the Senses) falls in love with Absal, and contrives by a stratagem to wile him into her arms. But before the decisive moment, a flash of lightning comes down from heaven, and reveals to Absal the wantonness of the action which he had nearly committed, and raises him from the world of sensual enjoyment to that of pure spiritual contemplation. In another passage the soul of the philosopher is compared to a bird, which with great trouble escapes from the snares of the earth, traversing space in its flight, until the Angel of Death delivers it from the last of its fetters. That is Ibn Sina’s Mysticism. His soul has needs, for which his medicine-chest provides no resource, and which the life of a court cannot satisfy.