Here, men and women of all times and all religions, who have achieved this fullness of life, agree in their answer:  and by this answer we are at once taken away from dry philosophic conceptions and introduced into the very heart of human experience.  It is done, they say, on man’s part by Love and Prayer:  and these, properly understood in their inexhaustible richness, joy, pain, dedication and noble simplicity, cover the whole field of the spiritual life.  Without them, that life is impossible; with them, if the self be true to their implications, some measure of it cannot be escaped.  I said, Love and Prayer properly understood:  not as two movements of emotional piety, but as fundamental human dispositions, as the typical attitude and action which control man’s growth into greater reality.  Since then they are of such primary importance to us, it will be worth while at this stage to look into them a little more closely.

First, Love:  that over-worked and ill-used word, often confused on the one hand with passion and on the other with amiability.  If we ask the most fashionable sort of psychologist what love is, he says that it is the impulse urging us towards that end which is the fulfilment of any series of deeds or “behaviour-cycle”; the psychic thread, on which all the apparently separate actions making up that cycle are strung and united.  In this sense love need not be fully conscious, reach the level of feeling; but it must be an imperative, inward urge.  And if we ask those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul towards its Source;[133] which impels every living thing to pursue the most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God.  Love is for them much more than its emotional manifestations.  It is “the ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things”—­no less.  This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas Aquinas,[134] would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist; he might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement towards novelty a less beautiful and significant name.  “This indwelling Love,” says Plotinus, “is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature.  It implants the characteristic desire; the particular soul, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Love, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its being."[135]