express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
structures--however logic may seek to discredit them--will convey
spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
feeling involved in them? "What fruits dost thou bring back from this
thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real
test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the
second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music--and even, if
I dare say so, philosophy--make their fundamental appeal. No life is
whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.

We must now go on--and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful