As we have already repeatedly seen in less final matters, so here once more, at the end, we can trace the sad impoverishment to the spiritual outlook produced by the esteem in which the antique world generally held the psycho-physical peculiarities of trances, as directly valuable or even as prophetic of the soul’s ultimate condition; the contraposition and exaltation, already on the part of Plato and Aristotle, of a supposed non-actively contemplative, above a supposed non-contemplatively active life; the largely excessive, not fully Christianizable, doctrines of the Neo-Platonists as to the Negative, Abstractive way, when taken as self-sufficient, and as to Quiet, Passivity, and Emptiness of Soul, when understood literally; and the conception, rarely far away from the ancient thinkers, of the soul as a substance which, full-grown, fixed and stainless at the first, requires but to be kept free from stain up to the end. And yet the diminution of vitality in the trance, and even the inattention to more than one thing at a time in Contemplation, are, in themselves, defects, at best the price paid for certain gains; the active and the contemplative life are, ultimately, but two mutually complementary sides of life, so that no life ever quite succeeds in eliminating either element, and life, _caeteris paribus_, is complete and perfect, in proportion as it embraces both elements, each at its fullest, and the two in a perfect interaction; the Negative, Abstractive way peremptorily requires also the other, the Affirmative, Concrete way; the Quiet, Passivity, Emptiness are really, when wholesome, an incubation for, or a rest from, Action, indeed they are themselves a profound action and peace, and the soul is primarily a Force and an Energy, and Holiness is a growth of that Energy in Love, in full Being, and in creative, spiritual Personality. (2) Now on this whole matter the European Christian Mystics, strongly influenced by, yet also largely developing, certain doctrines of the Greeks, have, I think, made two most profound contributions to the truths of the spirit, and have seriously fallen short of reality in three respects.