True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, “is rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body; nourishment and refreshment."[94] Psychology endorses the constant statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat from the window, this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen “with the forces of the soul,” as Ruysbroeck puts it, “gathered into unity of the Spirit."[95] Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive, creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest ends:  and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of apprehending eternal values abides, “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.”  “Be still! be still! and know that I am God!”

Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance at one or two of its characteristics.  And first we notice that the fact that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst engaged in it.  Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and thought are not the faculties primarily involved.  What is involved, is reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or some intruding image starts a new train of associations.  The religious mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and fall of feeling rather than the control of the will.  “By love shall He be gotten and holden, by thought never.”

Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and must present its apprehensions to consciousness.  Its cognitions of the spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:  and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life of sense.  The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this.  God is “known darkly.”  Our experience of Eternity is “that of which nothing can be said.”  It is “beyond feeling” and “beyond knowledge,” a certitude known in the ground of the soul, and so forth.  It is indeed true that the spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it, however fleeting.  But constantly the foreconscious—­which, as we shall do