One of the most influential twelfth-century European theologians, the Scottish monk Richard of Saint-Victor, who became prior of the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, was particularly interested in the processes of mystic contemplation and in how the mind could ascend beyond the limits of the intellect to experience the truth of divine mysteries. This excerpt comes from his treatise known commonly as The Mystical Ark or Benjamin major, which explains how the mind ascends from the sensory world, through the intellectual sphere, to contemplate questions beyond the powers of human reason. Of interest for our purposes are the rich descriptions he gives of the experience of thinking. Richard’s work is considerably more detailed than other writings on the mind in the twelfth century. He goes beyond his contemporaries, who provide only the thinnest descriptions of cognition, to describe not just the nature but the experience of thought. The internal powers of cognition cannot actually be seen, and Richard’s elaborate, almost poetic imagery in discussing the powers of imagination, ingenuity, and reason are attempts to visualize for his audience the invisible experience of thought. His Mystical Ark is, then, one of the key texts for psychology in this period.