If you have ever spent dreary weeks doing house or farm chores, you probably have experienced moments of intellectual despair--that is, the sense that your mind is enslaved by the needs of the body. You feel as if your mind is a caged wild bird, beating against rigid bars--the parameters that sustain physical life. Instead, think of it this way--the body is the instrument of the mind. Physical experience is the mind's feeding ground.
In his essay "Of Education" Milton wrote,
"The end, then, of learning, is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest, by possessing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleary to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching."
The immaterial light is kindled through matter.
