[Footnote 34: Roman Catholic writers can assert that "la plupart des contemplatifs étaient dépourvus de toute culture littéraire." But their notion of "contemplation" is the passive reception of "supernatural favours,"—on which subject more will be said in Lectures IV. and VII.]
[Footnote 35: "Die Mystik ist formlose Speculation," Noack, Christliche Mystik, p. 18.]
[Footnote 36: The Atomists, from Epicurus downwards, have been especially odious to the mystics.]
[Footnote 37: The theory that time is real, but not space, leads us into grave difficulties. It is the root of the least satisfactory kind of evolutionary optimism, which forgets, in the first place, that the idea of perpetual progress in time is hopelessly at variance with what we know of the destiny of the world; and, in the second place, that a mere progressus is meaningless. Every created thing has its fixed goal in the realisation of the idea which was immanent in it from the first.]
[Footnote 38: Origen in Matth., Com. Series, 100; Contra Celsum, ii. 64. Referred to by Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, p. 191.]
[Footnote 39: Paradiso viii. 13—
"Io non m'accorsi del salire in ella;
Ma d'esserv' entro mi fece assai fede
La donna mia ch'io vidi far più bella." ]
[Footnote 40: "Deo nihil opponitur," says Erigena.]
[Footnote 41: Compare Bradley, Appearance and Reality, where it is shown that the essential attributes of Reality are harmony and inclusiveness.]
[Footnote 42: I.e. "necessary" or "expedient.">[