Hugo has much to say of the _pulchritudo_ and the _decor_ of the creature-world. But with him the world and its beauty point to God. One should observe it because of its suggestiveness, the visible suggesting the invisible. Hugo has already been followed in his argument that the world, in its veriest reality, is a symbol.[491] Here we follow him along his path of knowledge, which leads on and upward from _cogitatio_, through _meditatio_, to _contemplatio_. The steps in Hugo’s scheme are rational, though the summit lies beyond. This path to truth, leading on from the visible symbol to the unseen power, is for him the reason and justification of study; drawing to God it makes for man’s salvation. Hugo has put perhaps his most lucid exposition of the three grades of knowledge into the first of his _Nineteen Sermons on Ecclesiastes_.[492] He is fond of certain numbers, and here his thought revolves in categories of the number three. Solomon composed three works, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Canticles. In the first, he addresses his son paternally, admonishing him to pursue virtue and shun vice; in the second, he shows the grown man that nothing in the world is stable; finally, in Canticles, he brings the consummate one, who has spurned the world, to the Bridegroom’s arms. “Three are the modes of cognition (_visiones_) belonging to the rational soul: cogitation, meditation, contemplation. It is cogitation when the mind is touched with the ideas of things, and the thing itself is by its image presented suddenly, either entering the mind through sense or rising from memory. Meditation is the assiduous and sagacious revision of cogitation, and strives to explain the involved, and penetrate the hidden. Contemplation is the mind’s perspicacious and free attention, diffused everywhere throughout the range of whatever may be explored. There is this difference between meditation and contemplation: meditation relates always to things hidden from our intelligence; contemplation relates to things made manifest, either according to their nature or our capacity. Meditation always is occupied with some one matter to be investigated; contemplation spreads abroad for the comprehending of many things, even the universe. Thus meditation is a certain inquisitive power of the mind, sagaciously striving to look into the obscure and unravel the perplexed. Contemplation is that acumen of intelligence which, keeping all things open to view, comprehends all with clear vision. Thus contemplation has what meditation seeks.