Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely unweakened, indeed how impressively strengthened, by the intervening severe test of whole centuries of further experience and of thought, has remained the main and direct, the spiritual test of the great Mystics, in contradistinction to their secondary psychological contention with respect to such experiences. The secondary, psychological contention is well reproduced by St. Teresa where she says: “When I speak, I go on with my understanding arranging what I am saying; but, if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen without any labour.” In the former case, “the soul,” if it be in good faith, “cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself arranges the words and utters them to itself. How then can the understanding have time enough to arrange these locutions? They require time.”[46] Now this particular argument for their supernaturalness derived from the psychological form--from the suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these locutions--has ceased to carry weight, owing to our present, curiously recent, knowledge concerning the subconscious region of the mind, and the occasionally sudden irruption of that region’s contents into the field of that same mind’s ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven. Battista Vernazza’s case we have a particularly clear instance of such a long accumulation,--by means of much, in great part full, attention to certain spiritual ideas, words, and images,--in the subconscious regions of a particularly strong and deeply sincere and saintly mind; and the sudden irruption from those regions of certain clear and apparently quite spontaneous words and images into the field of her mind’s full consciousness.[47]