Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties occur, the one philosophical, the other moral. The philosophical difficulty is as follows. As long as the earlier stages are in progress, it is not difficult to understand that the soul may be gradually building up for herself a world of spiritual apprehensions, and a corresponding spiritual and moral character, by a process which, looked at merely phenomenally and separately, appears as a simple case of mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, but which can and should be conceived, when studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the pressure and influence of God’s spirit working in and through the spirit of man,--the Creator causing His own little human creature freely to create for itself some copy of and approach to its own eternally subsisting, substantial Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an underlying Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between the world thus conceived and built up by the human soul and the real world of the Divine Spirit, appears possible, because the things which the soul is thus made to suggest to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas are clearly recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches to the realities for which they stand. But here, in this last stage, we get the suggestion, not of ideas, but of psycho-physical impressions, and these impressions are, apparently, not taken as but distantly illustrative, but as somehow one with the spiritual realities for which they stand. Is not, _e.g._, Catherine’s joy at this stage centred precisely in the downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of ocean waters, penetrating odours, all-enveloping light; and in the identification of those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God becomes at last an object of direct, passive, sensible perception? Have we not then here at last reached pure delusion?