5. The reception of this higher life is nor mally conditioned by certain spiritual disposi tions and lines of conduct—notably of faith, love, prayer, repentance and self-discipline. The soul is thus prepared by alienation from carnal and inordinate propensities and rendered more sensitive to higher stimuli.
6. According to the degree of the soul's co-operation with the indwelling Spirit of God the former becomes proportionately assimilated to the latter. The soul thus passes from what is known as the purgative to the illuminative stage of mystical life.
7. This assimilation culminates in the act of contemplation which is distinguished from med itation in that it is not elicited with mental strain and does not apprehend its object, the divine presence or cognate truths, by inference; but in consequence of the immanent light simply gazes intuitively thereon; contemplatio pertinet ad simplicem intuitum veritatis, as all the •mystics teach. The clarity of this act or state of vision begets sentiments of admiration, contemplatio est perspicuce veritatit jucunda admiratio, as Saint Augustine says, and fills the consciousness with joy and rapture. The facul ties are herein not merely passive, for contem plation is a vital activity, though the divine influence is the primary source of its elevation and application to the corresponding truths. The Church censured the teaching of the Span ish mystical writer Molinos on the question of the soul's passivity in contemplation,— a theory which was taken up by Madame Guiosi in France, and eliciting Fenelon's (q.v.) sympathy, entailed the .well-known controversy with his great contemporary Bossuet (q.v.).
8. The unitive or contemplative state in so far as it is susceptible of psychologocal analysis is essentially intellectual, the mind being ab sorbed in intuition; it is, however, no less essen tially volitional and in the sanest sense emo tional, the whole adhesive power of the soul being drawn out in love of the object contem plated. Obviously, however, the two forms of en ergy — intellectual and emotional — act and re act upon one another and in the intenser states of mental absorption entirely interfuse, all psy chical differentiation being obliterated and the entire field of consciousness bathed so to say in light and love of the object contemplated. With the intellectual activity is generally though not always associated representations of the imag ination wherein the object contemplated is symbolized. The object-matter of contempla tion is primarily God or some of his attributes.
Secondarily it may be any divine manifestation in the created, inanimate or animate order, above all in this respect the humanity of Christ. With many of the mystics the suggestion of the divine perfections reflected from almost any object in nature was enough to lift them at once to a condition of wrapt contemplation.
9. The strictly contemplative condition varies in duration from moments to several hours, dependently on preternatural and natural con ditions. In the highest stage it may become practically habitual and yet leave a normal residue of attentlonal energy amply sufficient for all the demands of every-day life. Often times it is associated with extraordinary psychi cal phenomena such as ecstasy, supernal reve lations, visual or auditory— states wherein the mind sometimes though not always loses con sciousness of self and of all else save the object contemplated. These are .not, however, as many suppose, essential properties of mystical experience, but are rather effects resulting from the absorption of the psychical energy. An as serted similarity of these states to the well known phenomena transpiring under the various forms of somnambulism, obsession, divided personality and the like, has led many psychologists to confound all mystic states with abnormal psychoses. The subject here opened out is a large one. The reader will find it fairly discussed in The Psychology of the Suffice it to note with M. Joly that the tette mystical state as realized in the saints' ex perience is not a °disintegration" of the powers of the mind; it is an aggregation of the closest possible kind, which derives its strength from a higher principle under the control of which it forms and sustains itself. It is not a narrowing of the field of consciousness" but the opening out of a wider field, at the cost, if we may use the expression, of a nar rowing of the field of passing sensations and empty illusions. Neither is it a °division of the personality* although it certainly evokes what May be called a anew personality," and that at the cost of great sacrifice and much suffering. This personality" is not a medley of divided and disordered parts. It exhibits a cohesion, a strength and a unity above anything else which psychology can show' us. This personality" also retains whatever was best of the original personality and these sur viving' elements combine peacefully with the new.