Excerpt from The Treasure of the Humble 'if, plunging thine eyes into thyself - it is this same Plotinus that he is quoting thou dost not feel the charm of beauty, it is in vain that, thy disposition being such, thou shouldst seek the charm of beauty; for thou wouldst seek it only with that which is ugly and impure. There fore it is that the discourse we hold here is not addressed to all men.' If we are to follow him in his expedition to a philosophic Ultima Thule, we must have the mind for that adventure. We are here, ' as he tells us elsewhere of the 'stie' but, it seems, admirable' Ruysbroeck, 'all of a sudden on the borderland of human thought and far across the Arctic circle of the Spirit. There is no ordinary cold, no ordinary dark there, and yet you shall find there naught but flames and light. But to those who arrive without having trained their minds to these new perceptions, the light and the flames are as dark and as cold as though they were painted.' This means that the intelligence, the reason, will not suffice of themselves; we must have faith. There are passages in the book which may provoke a sniff from Mr. Worldly Wiseman. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.