ence conceivable ? It seems to be a contradiction in terms—to know the Unknowable, to grasp the Incomprehensible, to receive the Infinite. Certainly it transcends the categories of human thought and the normal conditions of human experience. Yet it has remained for thousands of years as the goal—whether attainable or unattainable—of the religious life ; and no religion which ignores this aspiration can prove permanently satisfying to man’s spiritual needs. The whole religious experience of mankind—indeed, the very existence of religion itself—testifies, not only to a sense of the Transcendent, but to an appetite for the Transcendent that can only be satisfied by immediate contact—by a vision of the supreme Reality. It is the goal of the intellect as well as of the will, for, as a Belgian philosopher has said, ” The h u m a n m i n d is a faculty in quest of its intuition, that is to say, of assimilation with Being,” and it is ” perpetually chased from the movable, manifold and deficient towards the Absolute, the One and the Infinite, that is, towards Being pure and simple.” *
A religion that remains on the rational level and denies the possibility of any real relation with a higher order of spiritual reality, fails in * J. Marechal, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics ; trans. Algar Thorold. 1927, pp. 101, 133.