he affection follows the reason of
the species. And amongst men the same thing is seen, according as some
resemble one species of brute beast and some another: these having
something of the quadruped, and those of birds, and, may be, some
affinity, which I will not explain, but through which those have been
known who are affected by certain sorts of beasts. Now, it is lawful for
the mind which finds itself oppressed by the material conjunction of the
soul, to raise itself to the contemplation of another state, to which
the soul may arrive, comparing the two, and so through the future
despise the present. If a beast had a sense of the difference which
exists between his own condition and that of man, and the meanness of
his own state with the nobility of the human state, which he would deem
it not impossible to be able to reach, he would love death, which would
open to him that road, more than that life which keeps him in the
present state of being. When the soul complains, saying, "Ah! dogs of
Actaeon!" she is represented as a thing which appears only in the
inferior powers, and against which the mind rebels for having taken away
the heart with it; that is to say, the entire affections, with all the
army of the thoughts. So that, having a knowledge of the present state,
and being ignorant of every other, and not believing that others exist
about which she can have any knowledge, she complains of her thoughts,
which, tardily turning towards her, come rather to draw her up than to
make themselves accepted by her. And through the distraction which she
endures on account of the ordinary love of the material and of things
intelligible, she feels herself lacerated and mangled, so that at last
she is forced to yield to the more vigorous impulse. And if, by virtue
of contemplation, she rises or is caught up above the horizon of the
natural affections, whence with purer eye she learns the difference
between the one life and the other, then, vanquished by the lofty
thoughts, and, as if dead to the body, she aspires to that which is
elevated, and, although alive in the body, she vegetates there as if
dead, being present as an animating principle and absent in operative
activity; not because she does not act while the body is alive, but that
the actions of this mass are intermittent, weak, and, as it were,
purposeless.

CIC. Thus a certain theologian, who was said to be transported to the
third heaven and enchanted with the view of