t 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 co