enter into all, even his most “spiritual” creations—­he seems able to attend to the messages which intuition picks up from other levels of being.  It is significant that nearly all spiritual writers use this very term of introversion, which psychology has now adopted as the most accurate that it can find, in a favourable, indeed laudatory, sense.  By it they intend to describe the healthy expansion of the inner life, the development of the soul’s power of attention to the spiritual, which is characteristic of those real men and women of prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as:—­

    “Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eternal Truth
    Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter peace."[89]

It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this power of retreat from the surface, and has failed thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies, can live a spiritual life.  This is why silence and meditation play so large a part in all sane religious discipline.  But the ideal state, a state answering to that rhythm of work and prayer which should be the norm of a mature spirituality, is one in which we have achieved that mental flexibility and control which puts us in full possession of our autistic and our realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner and the outer world.

This being so, it is worth while to consider in more detail the character of foreconscious thought.

Foreconscious thinking, as it commonly occurs in us, with its unchecked illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end, combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream.  But where a definite wish or purpose, an end, dominates this reverie and links up its images and ideas into a cycle, we get in combination all the valuable properties both of affective and of directed thinking; although the reverie or contemplation place in the fringe-region of our mental life, and in apparent freedom from the control of the conscious reason.  The object of recollection and meditation, which are the first stages of mental prayer, is to set going such a series and to direct it towards an assigned end:  and this first inward-turning act and self-orientation are voluntary, though the activities which they set up are not.  “You must know, my daughters,” says St. Teresa, “that this is no supernatural act but depends on our will; and that therefore we can do it, with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our acts and even for our good thoughts."[90]

Consider for a moment what happens in prayer.  I pass over the simple recitation of verbal prayers, which will better be dealt with when we come to consider the institutional framework of the spiritual life.  We are now concerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and