In the strictly metaphysical sense no external cause acts upon us excepting God alone, and he is in immediate relation with us only by virtue of our continual dependence upon him. Whence it follows that there is absolutely no other external object which comes into contact with our souls and directly excites perceptions in us. We have in our souls ideas of everything only because of the continual action of God upon us, that is to say, because every effect expresses its cause and therefore the essences of our souls are certain expressions, imitations or images of the divine essence, divine thought and divine will, including all the ideas which are there contained. We may say, therefore, that God is for us the only immediate external object, and that we see things through him. For example, when we see the sun or the stars, it is God who has given to us and preserves in us the ideas of them, and whenever our senses are affected according to his own laws in a certain manner, it is he, who by his continual cooperation determines us actually to think of them. God is the sun and light of souls, “the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” and this is no merely recent opinion. Not to mention the Holy Scriptures and the Church Fathers, who were always more favorable to Plato than to Aristotle, I think I have previously remarked that in a later period, that of the scholastics, there “were some who believed that God is the light of the soul and, as they put it, the active intellect of the rational soul (intellectus agens animae rationalis). The Averroists misused this conception, but others, among whom were several mystic theologians and William of Saint Amour also I think, understood this conception in a manner which assured the dignity of God and was able to raise the soul to a knowledge of its proper good.