If it be asked, "how can it be said that an universe, which depends for its objective reality upon the complex vision, goes on beyond the point where the complex vision stops?" I would answer that the complex vision does not only create reality; it discovers reality. There is always the primordial objective mystery outside the complex vision; that objective mystery, or world-stuff, or world-clay, out of which, in its process of half-creation and half-discovery, the complex vision evokes the universe.

And although apart from the activity of the complex vision this primordial world-clay or objective mystery is almost nothing because it is only of its bare existence that we are aware, yet it is not altogether nothing, because it is, in a sense, the origin of everything we discover. When, therefore, we speak of the unfathomable as receding into depths beyond the point where the vision of man stops and beyond the point where the vision of the immortals stops, we do not contradict the statement that the vision of man and the vision of the immortals create the universe. They create the universe in so far as they discover the universe; but the universe must be thought of as always capable of being further discovered and further created. Perhaps the most adequate way of putting the situation would be to image the objective mystery as a kind of colourless screen across which a coloured picture is slowly moved. This coloured picture is the universe as we know it. Without the white screen as a background there could be no picture. All the colours of the picture are latent and potential in the whiteness of the screen; but they require the focussed lime-light of the magic-lantern to call them forth. The lantern from which the light comes, half-creates, so to speak, and half-discovers the resultant colours.

When we say, therefore, that the universe, although created by the complex vision, recedes into unfathomable depths beyond the reach of the complex vision, what we mean is that the boundary line between the moving colour-picture, which is the universe, and the original whiteness of the screen across which the picture is moved, which is the objective mystery, is capable of endless recession. The blank whiteness of the part of the screen over which the picture has not yet moved is capable of revealing every kind of colour as soon as the focussed lime-light of the complex vision reaches it. The colours are in the whiteness of the screen as well as in the lime-light which is thrown upon the screen; but neither the lantern which throws the light nor the screen upon which the light is thrown, can, in isolation from one another, produce colour.

The universe, therefore, is half-created and half-discovered by the complex vision; and it may be said to go on beyond the point where the complex vision stops, although strictly speaking what goes on beyond the stopping place of the complex vision is not the universe as we know it but a potential universe as we may come to know it; a universe, in fact, which is at present held in suspense in the unfathomable depths of the objective mystery.

This potential universe, this universe which will come into existence as soon as the complex vision discovers it and creates it, this universe across which gathers already the moving shadow of the complex vision, is not a new universe but only an extension into a further depth of the objective mystery, of the universe which we already know.

We are not justified in saying of this objective mystery or of this white screen across which the colours will presently flow, that it is outside time and space. We are not justified in saying anything at all about it, except that it exists and that it lends itself to the advance of the complex vision. If in place of a white screen we could figure to ourselves this objective mystery as a mass of impenetrable darkness, we should thus be able to envisage the complex vision as I have tried to envisage it, namely as a moving arrow-head of focussed flames with the point of it, or what I have named the apex-thought of it, illuminating that mass of darkness with all the colours of life.

But, as I have said, none of these subjective images can serve as the sort of symbol we are in search of, because by reason of their being arbitrary and individualistic they lack the organic and magical associations which cling round such symbols as have become objective and historical. We can content ourselves with such fanciful symbols as white screens and arrow-heads and pyramids of fire in regard to the organ of our research and the original protoplasmic stuff out of which this organ of research creates the world; but when it comes to the purpose of life and the meaning of life, when it comes to that unfathomable duality which is the essence of life, we require for our symbol something that has already gathered about it the whole desperate stream of life's tears and blood and dreams and ecstasies and memories and hopes.

We can find no symbol for the adversary of life, no symbol for the malignant obscurantism and the sneering malice that resist creation. To endow this thing which is in the way, this unfathomable depth of spiritual evil, with the vivid and imaginative life of a symbolic image would be to change its inherent nature. No adequate symbol can be found for evil, any more than a complete embodiment can be found for evil. Directly evil becomes personal it ceases to be evil, because personality is the supreme achievement of life. And directly evil is expressed in a living, objective, historic, mythological image it ceases to be evil, because such an image instantaneously gathers to itself some potency of creative energy. Evil is a positive thing, a spiritual thing, an eternal thing; but it is positive only in its opposition to creation, in its corruption of the soul, and in its subtle undermining of the divine moments of the soul by the power of eternal dreariness and disillusion.

What we need above everything is a symbolic image which shall represent the creative energy of life, the creative power of love, and those eternal ideas of truth and beauty and nobility which seem in some mysterious way derogated from, rendered less formidable and unfathomable, by being named "the good."

The desire for a symbol of this kind, which shall gather together all the tribes and nations of men and all conflicting ideals of humanity, is a desire so deep and universal as to be perhaps the supreme desire of the human race. No symbol arbitrarily invented by any one man, even though he were the greatest genius that ever lived, could supply this want or satisfy this desire. And it could not do so because it would lack the organic weathering and bleaching, so to speak, of the long panorama of time. An individual genius might hit upon a better symbolic image, an image more comprehensive, more inclusive, more appealing to the entire nature of the complex vision; but without having been subjected to the sun and rain of actual human experience, without having endured the passion of the passing of the generations, such an image would remain, for all its appropriateness, remote, intellectual and barren of magical suggestiveness.

I do not mean to indicate that there is necessarily any determined or fatalistic process of natural selection in these things by which one symbol rather than another gathers about it the hopes and fears of the generations. Chance no doubt plays a strange part in all this. But the concrete necessities of living human souls play a greater part than chance; and without believing in any steady evolutionary process or even in any law of natural selection among the evocations of human desire, it must still remain that the symbol which survives will be the symbol adapted to the deepest instincts of complicated souls and at the same time palpable and tangible to the touch of the crudest and most simple.

It cannot be denied that there are serious difficulties in the way of the acceptance of any historic symbol, the anonymous evocation of the generations of men. Just because it has a definite place in history such a symbol will necessarily have gathered to itself much that is false and much that is accidental and unessential. It will have entered into bitter controversies. It will have been hardened and narrowed by the ferocious logic of rationalistic definition. It will have been made the rallying cry of savage intolerances and the mask for strange perversions. Evil will naturally have attached itself to it and malice will have left its sinister stain upon it. Because chance and accident and even evil have had much to do with its survival, it may easily happen that some primary attribute of the complex vision, such for instance as the aesthetic sense with its innate awareness of the humorous and the grotesque, will have been forgotten altogether in the stuff out of which it is made.

Considering such things, considering above all this final fact that it may not satisfy every attribute of the complex vision, and may even completely suppress and negate some essential attribute, it remains still a perilous question whether it were not, after all, better to invent a new symbol that shall be deliberately adapted to the entire complex vision, than to accept an already existing symbol, which in the shocks and jolts and casualties, of history has been narrowed, limited and stiffened by the malice of attack and defence.

This narrowing and hardening process by which such a symbol, the anonymous creation of humanity under the shocks of circumstance, becomes limited and inadequate, is a process frequently assisted by those premature and violent syntheses of the ultimate contradiction which we name dogmatic religions. To make such a symbol once more fluid and flexible, to restore it to its place in the organic life of the soul, it is necessary to extricate it from the clutch of any dogmatic religion. I do not say that it is necessary to extricate it from religion, or even from every aspect of dogma; for it is of the very essence of such symbol to be a stimulus to the religious ecstasy and there are many dogmas which are full of imaginative poetry.

But it is necessary to extricate it from dogmatic religion because dogmatic religion may be defined as a premature metaphysical synthesis, masquerading beneath a system of imaginative ritual. The truth of religion is in its ritual and the truth of dogma is in its poetry. Where a dogmatic religion becomes dangerous to any human symbol is when it tries to rationalize it and interpret it according to a premature metaphysical synthesis. In so far as it remains purely symbolic and does not attempt to rationalize its symbolism, a dogmatic religion must always contain within the circle of its creed many profound and illuminating secrets. The false and ephemeral portion of a dogmatic religion is its metaphysical aspect, because the whole science of metaphysics is an ambiguity from the start, since it is a projection of one isolated attribute of the complex vision.

What the apex-thought of the complex vision does is to undermine metaphysic; not by the use of metaphysic but by the use of the rhythmic totality of all the attributes of the soul. The philosophy of the complex vision has its metaphysical, as it has its psychological and its physiological aspect, but its real starting point must transcend all these, because it must emanate from personality. And personality is something super-metaphysical; as it is something super-psychological, and super-physiological.

The creed of a dogmatic religion is not to be condemned because it calls upon us to believe the impossible. Some sort of belief in the impossible, some primordial act of faith is an essential part of the process of life and, without it, life could not continue. It is where dogmatic religion attempts to justify its belief in the impossible by the use of metaphysical reason that we must regard it as an enemy of the truth of its own symbolism.

The supreme example of the evil and dangerous influence of metaphysic upon religion is to be found in connection with that inscrutable nothingness behind the universe, and also behind the objective mystery out of which the soul creates the universe. I refer to that ambiguous and unbeautiful phantom, which has acquired for itself the name of "the absolute," or the parent or first cause of life.

That the conception of "the sons of the universe," to which certain basic facts and experiences in regard to the intercourse between living human souls has led humanity, is not a metaphysical conception, is proved by the fact that it is a conception of a reality existing inside and not outside the ultimate unity of time and space. Any pure metaphysical conception must, as we have seen, remain outside the categories of time and space, and remaining there bear perpetual witness to its essential unreality.

The sons of the universe are living personal souls; and being this, they must be, as all personalities are, super-metaphysical, super-psychological, and super-physiological.

The perilous choice between the invention of an arbitrary symbol which shall represent in its full complexity this idea of the sons of the universe, and the acceptance of a symbol already supplied by that chaotic mixture of accident and human purpose which we call history is a choice upon which more than we can imagine or surmise may ultimately depend. It is necessary in all matters of this kind, wherein the rhythmic totality of the complex vision is involved, to remain rigorous in our suppression of any particular usurpation of the whole field by any isolated attribute of the soul. It is a most evil usurpation, for instance, an usurpation of which the sinister history of dogmatic religion is full, when the conscience is allowed to introduce the conception of a "duty," of an "ought," of a "categorical" imperative, into such a choice as this. There is no ought in philosophy. There is no ought in faith. And there can be, in no possible way, any ought of the usurping conscience, in regard to this choice of an appropriate symbol which shall represent a thing so entirely beyond the conception of any single attribute, as this eternal protagonist of the ultimate struggle. The risk of choosing for our symbol a mere arbitrary invention is that it should remain thin and cold and unappealing.

The risk of choosing for our symbol a form, a figure, a gesture, a name, offered us by history, is that it should carry with it too many of the false accretions of accident, chance, the passions of controversy and the hypocrisies of malice. But after all the anonymous creative spirit of the generations is so full of the wisdom of the earth and so involved with the rhythmic inspiration of innumerable souls, that it would seem better to risk the presence of certain sinister accretions, than to risk the loss of so much magical suggestiveness.

If we do select for our symbol such a form, such a shape, such a gesture and such a name, as history may offer, we shall at any rate be always free to keep it fluid and malleable and organic. We shall be free to plunge it, so to speak, again and again into the living reality which it has been selected to represent. We shall be free to extricate it completely from all its accretions of chance and circumstance and material events. We shall be free to extricate it from all premature metaphysical syntheses. We shall be free to draw it from the clutches of dogmatic religion. We shall be free to make it, as all such symbols should be made, poetical and mythological and, in the aesthetic sense, shamelessly anthropomorphic. Above all we shall be completely free, since it represents for us those sons of the universe who are the embodiment of the creative energy, to associate it with every aspect of the life of the soul. We shall be free to associate it with those aspects of the soul which in the process of its slow invention by the generations have, it may be, been disassociated from it and separated from it. We shall be free to use it as a symbol for the fuller, complete life of the future, and for every kind of revolt, into which the spirit of creation may drive us, against the evil obscurantism and malicious inertness which resist the power of love. The conclusion to which we are thus led, the choice which we are thus compelled to make, is one that has been anticipated from the beginning. No other name except the name of Christ, no other figure except the figure of Christ, can possibly serve, if we are to make any use of history at all, as our symbol for the sons of the universe.

The choice of Christ as our symbol for these invisible companions does not imply that we are forced to accept in their entirety the scriptural accounts of the life of Jesus, or even that we are forced to assume that the historic Jesus ever lived at all. The desire which the soul experiences for the incarnation of Christ does not prove that Christ has already been incarnated, or ever will be incarnated. And it does not prove this because, in the greater, nobler, and more spiritual moods of the soul, there is no need for the incarnation of Christ. In these rare and indescribable moments, when the past and future seem annihilated and we experience the sensation of eternity, Christ is felt to be so close to us that no material incarnation could make him any closer.

The association of Christ with the figure of Jesus is a sublime accident which has had more influence upon the human soul than any other historic event; and it must be confessed that the idea of Christ has been profoundly affected by this association. It has been so deepened and enlarged and clarified by it that the substitution of the religion of Jesus for the religion of Christ has been an almost entirely fortunate event, since it has furnished the soul with a criterion of the true nature of love which otherwise it might never have gained.

Jesus undoubtedly came so much nearer than any other to the understanding of the nature of love, and consequently of the nature of "the immortals," that the idea of the incarnation—that beautiful concession to the weakness of the flesh—emanated with an almost inevitable naturalness from their association. Jesus himself felt in his own soul the presence of the invisible companions; although he was led, by reason of his peculiar religious bent, and by reason of the influences that surrounded him, to speak of these companions as a "heavenly father."

But the words of Jesus which carry with them the very magic of truth are not the words in which he speaks of his "father," but the words in which he speaks of himself as if he were the very incarnation of Love itself. There is no doubt that the sons of the universe found in Jesus a soul so uniquely harmonious with their own that there existed between them a sympathy and an understanding without parallel in the history of humanity.

It is this sympathy which is the origin of those unequalled words used by the son of Mary in which he speaks as if he were himself in very truth an incarnation of the vision of the immortals. The whole situation is one which need have little mystery for those who understand the nature of love. In moment after moment of supreme ecstasy Jesus felt himself so given up to the will of the invisible companions that this own identity became lost. In speaking for himself he spoke for them; in suffering for himself he suffered for them, and in the great hours of his tragic wayfaring he felt himself so close to them that, by reason of his love, he knew himself able to speak of the secret of life even as the immortals themselves would speak.

We are permitted indeed in reading the divine narrative to distinguish between two moods in the soul of Jesus. In one of these moods he refers to his "father" as if his father were distinct and separate from him and even very distant. In the other mood he speaks as if he himself were in very truth a god; and were able, without any appeal to any other authority, to heal the wounds of the world and to reveal to mankind the infinite pity of the love which is beyond analysis.

It is towards the words and gestures of the son of Mary, when he spoke of himself rather than of his "father" that we are inevitably drawn, in our search for an adequate symbol for the eternal vision. It is when he speaks with authority as if he himself were an immortal god, as if he himself were one of the invisible companions, that his words and gestures carry the very breath and fragrance of truth.

As the drama of his life unfolds itself before us we seem to grow more and more aware of these two aspects of his soul. It was his reason, brooding upon the traditions of his race, that led him into that confusion of the invisible witnesses with the jealous tribal God of his father David. It was the rhythmic harmony of his soul, rising up out of the depths of his struggle with himself, that led him, in his passionate submission to the will of his invisible friends, to feel as if he were identical with those friends, as if he were himself the "son of man" and the incarnation of man's supreme hope.

It is the emphasis laid by Jesus upon his identity with his "father" which has produced the tragic results we know. For although this was the personal conception of the noblest of all human souls, it remains a proof of how much even the soul of Jesus was limited and restricted by the malicious power which opposes itself to love.

The living companions of men are as we have seen a necessary answer to the craving of the complex vision for some objective standard of beauty and reality, which shall give these things an eternal unity and purpose. Such a vision is an answer to our desire that the spirit of creative love, which is one side of the unfathomable duality, should be embodied in personality.

And we have a right to use the name of Christ in this sense; and to associate it with all that immortal anonymous company, so beautiful, so pitiful, so terrible, which the name of "the gods" has, in its turbulent and dramatic history, gathered about itself.

The idea of Christ is older than the life of Jesus; nor does the life of Jesus, as it has come down to us in ecclesiastical tradition, exhaust or fulfil all the potentialities latent in the idea of Christ. What the complex vision seems to demand is that the invisible companions of men should be regarded as immortal gods. If, therefore, we throw all hesitancy and scruple aside and risk the application of the name of Christ to this vision of the sons of the universe, then we shall be compelled to regard Christ as an immortal God.

The fact that there must be some objective standard which shall satisfy all the passionate demands of the complex vision is the path by which we reach this conception of Christ. But once having reached him he ceases to be a mere conception of the intellect, and becomes an objective reality which we can touch and appeal to with our emotion, our imagination, and our aesthetic sense. But although Christ as our symbolic image of the invisible companions, must be assumed to be the objective standard of all our ideas of truth, it is obvious that we cannot escape from subjectivity in our individual interpretation of his deeper and truer vision.

Thus there are two parallel streams of growth and change. There is growth and change in the soul of Christ as he continually approximates nearer and nearer to his eternally receding ideal. And there is growth and change in the accumulated harmony of our individual ideas about his ideal, as each human soul and each generation of human souls restates this ideal in terms of its own limited vision.

Each new restatement of this accumulated interpretation of the ideal of the son of man brings necessarily with it an innate conviction of its truth because it finds an immediate response in every individual soul in so far as such individual souls are able to overcome their intrinsic evil or malice.

What Jesus did for the universe was to recognize in it the peculiar nature of that love which is its essential life. He would have done yet more for it had he been able to disassociate his vision from the conception of an imaginary father of the universe and from his traditional interest in the tribal god of his ancestors. But Jesus remains the one human soul who has revealed to us in his own subjective vision the essential secret of the vision of the immortals. And that he has done so is proved by the fact that all his words and actions have come to be inextricably associated with the Christ-idea.

In this way Jesus remains the profoundest of all human philosophers and the subtlest of all human psychologists; and although we have the right to disassociate the Christ-idea from the sublime illusion of Jesus which led him to confuse the invisible companions of humanity with the tribal God of the Hebrews, we are compelled to recognize that Jesus has done so much for humanity by the depth of his psychological insight that we do not experience any shock when in the ritual of the Church the name of the son of David becomes identical with the name of Christ.

The essential thing to establish is that there are greater depths in the Christ-idea than even Jesus was able to fathom; and that compared with the soul of Jesus or with the soul of any other man or god or spiritual entity, the figure of Christ has come now at last to be for humanity the only god we need; for he is the only god whose love for all living things is beyond question and dispute, and whose existence is assumed and implied when any soul in the universe loves any other soul.

It is necessary then to do two things. To accept without reserve the vision which Jesus had as to the secret of love; because to nothing less than this does the love which we possess in our own souls respond. And in the second place to be merciless and drastic, even at the risk of pain to the weakness of our human flesh, in separating the personality of Christ, the immortal god, from the historic figure of the traditional Jesus. By doing these two things, and by this alone, we establish what the complex vision desires, upon a firm ground. For we retain what the vision of Jesus has revealed to us as to the inherent nature of the invisible companions and we are saved from all controversy as to the historic reality of the life of Jesus.

It does not matter to us whether Jesus "really lived"; or whether, like other great figures, his personality has been created by the anonymous instinct of humanity. What matters to us is that humanity itself, using the vision of Jesus as its organ of research or as the focus point of its own passionate clairvoyance has in some way or another recognized that the secret of the universe is to be found in the unfathomable duality of love and malice. From this point, now it has been once reached, the intrinsic nature of all human souls makes sure that humanity cannot go back. And it is because, either by his own sublime insight or by the accident and chance of history, the figure of Jesus has become associated with the reality of the immortal gods that we are justified in using for our symbol of these sons of the universe no other name than the name of Christ.

We shall, however, be doing wrong to our conception of Christ, if, while recognizing that the kind of love, of which Jesus revealed the secret, is the essence of Christ's soul, we refuse to find in him also many aspects and attributes of life which occupy but little place or no place at all in the traditional figure of Jesus.

All that is most beautiful and profound, all that is most magical and subtle, in the gods of the ancient world, must be recognized as existent in the soul of Christ who is our true "Son of the Morning." The earth-magic of the ancient gods must be in him; and the Titanic spirit which revolted against such gods must be in him also. The mystery of the elements must be interwoven with the very stuff of his being and the unfathomable depths of Nature must be a path for his feet. In him all mythologies and all religions must meet and be transcended. He is Prometheus and Dionysus. He is Osiris and Balder. He is the great god Pan. "All that we have been, all that we are, and all that we hope to be, is centred in him alone." His spirit is the creative spirit which moves for ever upon the face of the waters. In him all living souls find the object of their love. Against him the unfathomable power of evil struggles with eternal demonic malice. In his own soul it struggles against him; and in the universe which confronts him it struggles against him. His inmost being is made up of the duality of this struggle even as is the inmost being of all that exists. If it were not for the presence of evil in him his passion of love would be as nothing. For without evil there can be no good, and without malice there cannot be love. His soul and our human souls remain the ultimate reality. These alone are concrete, definite, actual and personal. All except these is ambiguous, half-real and unstable as water. These and the universe which they create are the true truth; and compared with these every other "truth" is dubious, shadowy and unsubstantial.

These are the true truth, because these are personal; and we know nothing in life, and can know nothing, with the interior completeness with which we know personality. And the essence of that interior knowledge with which we know personality is our recognition of the unfathomable duality within ourselves. We cannot imagine the good in us as existing without the evil in us; and we cannot imagine the evil in us as existing without the good in us.

And this ultimate essence of reality must apply to the soul of Christ. And this duality has no reconciliation except the reconciliation that it is a duality in ourselves and a duality in him. For both the good and the evil in us recede into unfathomable depths. So that the ultimate reality of the universe is to be found in the two eternal emotions which perpetually contradict and oppose one another; of which the only unity and reconciliation is to be found in the fact that they both belong to every separate soul; and are the motive power which brings the universe into existence; and in bringing the universe into existence find themselves under the domination of time and space.

Every individual soul in the world is composed of two unfathomable abysses. From the limitless depths of each of these emanates an emotion which is able to obsess and preoccupy the whole field of consciousness. Every individual soul has depths, therefore, which descend into unfathomable recesses; and we are forced into the conclusion that the unfathomable recesses in the soul of Christ are subject to the same eternal duality as the souls of men.

Every movement of thought implies an evocation of the opposing passion of these two emotions. For no movement of thought can take place without the activity of the complex vision; and since one of the basic attributes of the complex vision is divided into these two primary emotions, we are compelled to conclude that it is impossible to think any thought at all without some evocation of the emotion of love and some evocation of the emotion of malice.

The emotion of love is the power that brings together and synthesizes those eternal ideas of truth and beauty and nobility which find their objective standard in the soul of Christ. The emotion of malice is the power that brings together and synthesizes and harmonizes those eternal ideas of unreality and hideousness and evil with which the love of Christ struggles desperately in the unfathomable depths of his soul. It matters to us little or nothing that we have no name to give to any among the gods except to this god; for in this god, in this companion of men, in this immortal helper, the complex vision of man finds all it needs, the embodiment of Love itself.

We arrive, therefore, at the very symbol we desire, at the symbol which in tangible and creative power satisfies the needs of the soul. We owe this symbol to nothing less than the free gift of the gods themselves; and to the anonymous strivings of the generations. And once having reached this symbol, this name of Christ, the same phenomenon occurs as occurs in the establishment of the real existence of the external universe. That, like this, was at first only a daring hypothesis, only a supreme act of faith, reached by the subjective effort of the innumerable individual souls. But once having been reached, it became, as this has become, a definite objective fact, whose reality turns out to have been implicit from the beginning.

Thus the name, the word, which we arrive at as the only possible symbol of our hope is found to be, as soon as we reach it, no longer merely a symbol but the outward sign of an invisible and eternal truth. And thus although it remains that we are forced to recognize that the world is full of gods and that the Person we name Christ is only one of an innumerable company of invisible companions to whom in our loneliness we have a right to turn, yet just because the vision of humanity has found in Christ a completer, subtler, more beautiful, more revolutionary figure upon which to fix its hope than it has found in Buddha or Confucius or Mahomet, or any other name, the figure of Christ has become the supreme and solitary embodiment of the Ideal to which we look, and about this figure has come to gather itself and focus itself all the hopeless longing with which the soul of man turns to the souls of the immortals.

These divine people of the abyss, these sons of the universe, are for us henceforth and must be now for us for ever summed up and embodied in this one figure, the only one among them all whose nature and being has been drawn so near to us that we can appropriate it to ourselves.

It remains that the unity of time and space contains an immeasurable company of immortals; but of these immortals only one has been articulated and outlined, and so to speak "touched with the hand," by the troubled passion of humanity. Henceforth, therefore, while the necessity of the complex vision compels us to think of the invisible company of the sons of the universe as a vast hierarchy of supernatural beings, the necessity of the complex vision compels us also to recognize, that of this company, only one—only one until the end of time—can be the true symbol of what our heart desires.

It is better to think of the evocation of this figure as due to the pity of the gods themselves and to the anonymous craving of humanity than to think of him as dependent upon the historic evidence as to the personality of Jesus. The soul requires something more certain than historic evidence upon which to base its faith. It requires something closer and more certain even than the divine "logoi" attributed to the historic Jesus. It requires a living and a personal soul for ever present to the depths of its own nature. It requires a living and a personal soul for ever ready to answer the cry of its love. The misery and unhappiness, the restlessness and pain of all our human "loves," is due to the fact that the only eternal response to Love as it beats its hands against the barriers set up against it, is the embodiment of Love itself as we feel it present with us in the figure of Christ.

The love which draws two human souls together can only become eternal and indestructible when it passes beyond the love of the two for one another into the love of both of them for the Lover who is immortal. This merging of the love of human lovers into the love of the immortal Lover does not imply the lessening or diminishing of the love which draws them together. The nature of this love cries out against their separation, cries out that they two shall become one. And yet if they actually and in very truth became one, that unity in difference which is the very essence of love would be destroyed. But though they know this well enough there still remains the desperate craving of the two that they should become one; and this is of the very nature of love itself. Thus it may be seen that the only path by which human lovers can be satisfied is by merging their love for one another into their love for Christ. In this way, in a sense profounder than mortal flesh can know, they actually do become one. They become so completely one that no power on earth or above the earth can ever separate them. For they are bound together by no mortal link but by the eternal love of a soul beyond the reach of death. Thus when one of them comes to die the love which was of the essence of that soul lives on in the soul of Christ; and when both of them are dead it can never be as though their love had not been, for in the eternal memory of Christ their love lives on, increasing the love of Christ for others like themselves and continually drawing the transitory and the mortal nearer to the eternal and the immortal.

It therefore becomes evident why it is that the vision of the invisible companions which remains our standard of reality and of beauty is not broken up into innumerable subjective visions but is fixed and permanent and sure. All the unfathomable souls of the world, and all souls are unfathomable whether they are the souls of plants or animals or planets or gods or men, are found, the closer they approach one another, to be in possession of the same vision. For this immortal vision, in which what we name beauty, and what we name "reality," finds its synthesis, is found to be nothing less than the secret love. And while the great company of the immortal companions are only known to us by the figure of one among them, namely by the figure of Christ, this figure alone is sufficient to contain all that we require of life; for being the embodiment of love this figure is the embodiment of life, of which love is the creator and the sustainer.

Thus what the apex-thought of man's complex vision reveals is not only the existence of the gods but the fact that the vision of the gods is not broken up and divided but is one and the same; and is yet for ever growing and deepening. And the only measure of the vision of the gods which we possess is the figure of Christ; for it has come about by reason of the anonymous instinct of humanity, by reason of the compassion of the immortals, and by reason of the divine insight of Jesus, that the figure of Christ contains within it every one of those primordial ideas from which and towards which, in a perpetual advance which is also a perpetual return, the souls of all living things are for ever journeying.

Whether the souls of men and of beasts, of plants and of planetary spheres survive in any form after they are dead we know not and can never know. But this at least the revelation of the complex vision makes clear, that the secret of the whole process is to be found in the mystery of love; and to the mystery of love we can, at the worst, constantly appeal; for the mystery of love has been at last embodied for us in a living figure over whom Death has no control.

CHAPTER XI.

THE ILLUSION OF DEAD MATTER

The philosophy of the complex vision is based, as I have shown, upon nothing less than the whole personality of man become conscious of itself in the totality of its rhythmic functioning. This personality, although capable of being analysed in its constituent elements, is an integral and unfathomable reality. And just because it is such a reality it descends and expands on every side into immeasurable depths and immeasurable horizons.

We know nothing as intimately and vividly as we know personality and every knowledge that we have is either a spiritual or a material abstraction from this supreme knowledge. This knowledge of personality which is our ultimate truth, implies a belief in the integral and real existence of what we call the soul. And because personality implies the soul and because we have no ultimate conception of any other reality in the world except the reality of personality, therefore we are compelled to assume that every separate external object in Nature is possessed of a soul.

The peculiar psychological melancholy which sometimes seizes us in the presence of inanimate natural objects, such as earth and water and sand and dust and rain and vapour, objects whose existence may superficially appear to be entirely chemical or material, is accounted for by the fact that the soul in us is baffled and discouraged and repulsed by these things because by reason of their superficial appearance they convey the impression of complete soullessness. In the presence of plants and animals and all animate things we are also vaguely conscious of a strange psychological melancholy. But this latter melancholy is of a less poignant character than the former because what we seem superficially conscious of is not "soullessness" but a psychic life which is alien from our life, and therefore baffling and obscure.

In both of these cases, however, as soon as we are bold enough to apply the conclusions we have arrived at from the analysis of the knowledge which is most vivid and real to us, namely, the knowledge of our own soul, this peculiar psychological melancholy is driven away. It is a melancholy which descends upon us when in any disintegrated moment the creative energy in us, the energy of love in us, is overcome by the evil and inertness of the aboriginal malice. Under the influence of this inert malice, which takes advantage of some lapse or ebb of the creative energy in us, the rhythmic activity of our complex vision breaks down; and we visualize the world through the attributes of reason and sensation alone. And the world, visualized through reason and sensation alone, becomes a world of uniform, and homogeneous monotony, made up either of one all-embracing material substance, or of one all-embracing spiritual substance. In either case that living plurality of real separate "souls" which correspond to our own soul vanishes away, and a dreary and devastating oneness, whether spiritual or chemical, fills the whole field. The world which is the emanation of this atrophied and distorted vision is a world of crushing dreariness; but it is an unreal world because the only vivid and unfathomable reality we know is the reality of innumerable souls. The curious thing about this world of superficial chemical or spiritual uniformity is that it seems the same identical world in the case of all separate souls whose complex vision is thus distorted by the prevalence of that which opposes itself to creation and by the consequent ebb and weakening of the energy of love. It is impossible to be assured that this is the case; but all evidence of language points towards such an identity of desolation between the innumerable separate "universes" of the souls which fill the world, when such souls visualize existence through reason and sensation alone.

This also is a portion of the same "illusion of impersonality" into which the inert malice of the ultimate "resistance" betrays us with demonic cunning. What man is there among us who does not recall some moment of visionary disintegration, when, in the presence of both these mysteries, an unspeakable depression of this kind has overtaken him? He has stood, perhaps, on some wet autumn evening, watching the soulless reflection of a dead moon in a pond of dead water; while above him the motionless distorted trunk of some goblinish tree mocks him with its desolate remoteness from his own life.

At that moment, with his abortive and atrophied complex vision, all he sees is the eternal soullessness and deadness of matter; dead moonlight, dead water, dead mud and slime and refuse, dead mist and vapour, dead earth-mould and dead leaves. And while the desolate chemistry of nothingness grips him with its dead fingers and he turns hopelessly to the silent tree-trunk at his side, that also repels him with the chill breath of psychic remoteness; and it seems to him that that also is strange and impersonal and unconscious; that that also is only a blind pre-determined portion of some huge planetary life-process that has no place for a living soul, but only a place for automatic impersonal chemistry. Brooding in this way, with the eternal malice of the system of things conquering the creative impulse in the depths of his soul, he becomes obsessed with the idea that not only these isolated portions of Nature, but the whole of Nature, is thus alien and remote and thus given up to a desolate and soulless uniformity. Unutterable loneliness takes possession of him and he feels himself to be an exile in a dark and hostile assemblage of elemental forces. If at such a moment by means of some passionate invocation of the immortal gods, or by means of some desperate sinking into his own soul and gathering together of the creative energy in him, he is able to resist this desolation, how strange and sudden a shifting of mood occurs! He then, by a bold movement of imagination, restores the balance of his complex vision; and in a moment the spectacle is transfigured.

The apparently dead pond takes to itself the lineaments of some indescribable living soul, of which that particular portion of elemental being is the outward expression. The apparently dead moonlight becomes the magical influence of some mysterious "lunar soul" of which the earth's silent companions is the external form. The apparently dead mud of the pond's edge becomes a living portion of that earth-body which is the visible manifestation of the soul of the earth. The motionless tree-trunk at his side seems no longer the desolate embodiment of some vague "psychic life" utterly alien from his own life but reveals to him the immediate magical presence of a real soul there, whose personality, though not conscious in the precise manner in which he is conscious, has yet its own measure of complex vision and is mutely struggling with the cruel inertness and resistance which blocks the path of the energy of life. When once, by the bold synthesis of reason and sensation with those other attributes of the complex vision which we name instinct, imagination, intuition, and the like, the soul itself comes to be regarded as the substratum of personal existence, that desolating separation between humanity and Nature ceases to baffle us. As long as the substratum of personal life is regarded as the physical body there must always be this desolating difference and this remoteness.

For in such a case the stress is inevitably laid upon the physiological and biological difference between the body of a man and the body of the earth or the moon or the sun or any plant or animal. But as soon as the substratum of personal life is regarded not as the body but as the sour it ceases to be necessary to lay so merciless a stress upon the difference between man's elaborate physiological constitution and the simpler chemical constitution of organic or inorganic objects.

If the complex vision is the vision of the soul, if the soul uses its bodily sensation as only one among its other instruments of contact with life, then it is obvious that between the soul of a man and the soul of a planet or a plant there need be no such appalling and desolating gulf as that which fills us with such profound melancholy when we refuse to let the complex vision have its complete rhythmic play and insist on sacrificing the revelations made by instinct and intuition to the falsifying conclusions of reason and sensation, energizing in arbitrary solitude.

The "mort-main" or "dead-hand" of that aboriginal malice which resists life is directly responsible for this illusion of "unconscious matter" through the midst of which we grope like outlawed exiles. Reason and the bodily senses, conspiring together, are perpetually tempting us to believe in the reality of this desolate phantom-world of blind material elements; but the unreality of this corpse-life becomes evident directly we consider the revelation of the complex vision.

For the complex vision reveals to us that what we call "the universe" is a thing which is for ever coming newly and freshly into life, for ever being re-born and re-constituted by the interplay between the individual soul and the "objective mystery." Of the objective mystery itself, apart from the individual soul, we are able to say nothing. But since the "universe" is the discovery and creation of the individual soul, there must be as many different "universes" as there are living souls.

Our belief in "one universe," whose characteristics are relatively identical in the case of all the souls which contemplate it, is a belief which in part results from an original act of faith and in part results from an implicit appeal to those "invisible companions" whose concentrated will towards "reality" and "beauty" and "nobility" offers us our only objective standard of these ideas. From the ground, therefore, of this trinity of incomprehensible substances, namely the substance which is the substratum of the individual soul, the substance which is "the objective mystery" out of which the individual soul creates its universe, and the substance which is the "medium" or "link" which enables these individual souls to communicate with one another, emerge the only realities which we can know. And since this trinity of incomprehensible substances, thus divided one from another, must be thought of as dominated by the same unity of time and space, it is inconceivable that they should be anything else than three aspects of one and the same incomprehensible substance. From this it follows that from the ground of one incomprehensible substance which in its first aspect is the substratum of the soul, in its second aspect is the objective mystery confronting the soul, in its third aspect is the medium which holds all souls together, there must be evoked all the reality which we can conceive.

And this reality must, from the conclusions we have already reached, take two forms. It must take the form of a plurality of subjective "universes" answering to the plurality of living souls. And it must take the form of one objective "universe," answering to the objective standard of truth, beauty, and nobility, together with the opposites of these, which is implied in the tacit appeal of all individual souls to their "invisible companions."

In this double reality; the reality of one objective universe identical in its appearance to all souls but dependent for its identity upon an implicit reference to the "invisible companions," and the reality of as many subjective universes as there are living souls; in this double reality there is obviously no place at all for that phantom-world of unconscious "matter," which in the form of soulless elements, or soulless organic automata, fills the human mind with such devastating melancholy.

The dead pond with its dead moonlight, with its dead mud and its dead snow, is therefore no better than a ghastly illusion when considered in isolation from the soul or the souls which look forth from it. To the soul of which those elements are the "body" neither mud nor water nor rain nor earth-mould can appear desolate or dead. To the soul which contemplates these things there can be no other way of regarding them, as long as the rhythm of its vision is unimpeded, than as the outward manifestation of a personal life, or of many personal lives, similar in creative energy to its own.

Between the soul, or the souls, of the elements of the earth, and the soul of the human spectator there must be, if our conclusions are to be held good at all, a natural and profound reciprocity. The apparent "deadness," the apparent automatism of "matter," which projects itself between these two and resists with corpse-like opacity their reciprocal understanding, must be one of the ghastly illusions with which the sinister side of the eternal duality undermines the magic of life.

But although in its objective isolation, as an absolute entity, this "material deadness" of earth and water and rain and snow and of all disintegrated organic chemistry must be regarded as an "illusion," it would be a falsifying of the reality of things to deny that it is an "illusion" to which the visions of all souls are miserably subject. They are for ever subject to it because it is precisely this "illusion" which the unfathomable power hostile to life for ever evokes.

Nor must we for a moment suppose that this material objectivity, this pond, these leaves, this mud, this snow, are altogether unreal. Their reality is demanded by the complex vision and to deny their reality would be the gesture of madness. They are only unreal, they are only an "illusion," when they are considered as existing independently of the "souls" of which they are the "body." As the expression and manifestation of such "souls" they are entirely real. They are indeed, in this sense, as real as our own human body.

The human soul, when it suffers from that malignant power which has its positive and external existence in the soul itself, feels itself to be absolutely alone in the midst of a dark chaotic welter of monstrous elemental forces. In a mood of this kind the thought of the huge volumes of soulless water which we call "oceans" and "seas" crushes us with a devastating melancholy. The thought of the interminable deserts of "dead" sand and the vast polar ice fields and the monstrous excrescences that we call "mountains" have the same effect. But the supreme example of the kind of material ghastliness which I am trying to indicate, is, as may easily be surmised, nothing less than the appalling thought of the unfathomable spatial gulfs through which our whole stellar system moves. Here also, in this supreme insistence of objective "deadness," the situation is relieved when we realize that this unthinkable space is nothing more than the material expression of that indefinable "medium" which holds all souls together.

Moreover we must remember that these stellar gulfs cannot be thought of except as the habitation of innumerable living souls, each one of which is using this very "space" as the ground of its creation of the many-coloured impassioned "universe" which is its own dwelling. In all these instances of "objective deadness," whether great or small, we must not forget that the thing which desolates us and fills us with so intolerable a nostalgia is a thing only half real, a thing whose full reality depends upon the soul which contemplates it and upon the soul's implicit assumption that its truth is the truth of those "invisible companions" who supply us with our perpetually renewed and reconstituted standard of what is "good" and what is "evil."

There is an abominably vivid example of the kind of melancholy I have in my mind, which, although obviously less common to normal human experience than the forms of it I have so far attempted to suggest, is as a rule even more crushing in its cruelty. I refer to the sight of a dead human body; and in a less degree to the sight of a dead animal or a dead plant.

A human corpse laid out in its coffin, or nailed down in its coffin, how exactly does the particular attitude towards life, which for convenience sake I name the philosophy of the complex vision, find itself regarding that? Such a body, deserted by its living soul, is obviously no longer the immediate and integral expression of a personal life. Is it therefore no more than a shred or shard or husk or remnant of inconceivably soulless matter? The gods forbid! Certainly and most assuredly it is more than that.

An isolated heterogeneous mass of dead chemistry is a monstrous illusion which only exists for us when the weakness of our creative energy and the power of the original malice in the soul destroys our vision. This dead body lying in its wooden coffin is certainly possessed of no more life than the inanimate boards of the coffin in which it lies. But the inanimate boards of the coffin, together with the inanimate furniture of the house or room that contains it, and the bricks and stones and mortar of such a house, are themselves nothing less than inevitable portions of the vast earth-body of our planetary globe.

And this planetary globe, this earth upon which we live, cannot under any conceivable kind of reasoning to which imagination has contributed its share, be regarded as a dead or a soulless thing. In its isolated integrity, as a separate integral personality, the soul has deserted the body and left it "dead." But it is only "dead" when considered in isolation from the surrounding chemistry of planetary life. And to consider it in this way is to consider it falsely. For from the moment it ceases to be the expression of the life of an individual human soul, it becomes the expression— through every single phase of its chemical dissolution—of the life of the planet.

In so far as the human soul, which has deserted it, is concerned it is assuredly no better than a dead husk; but in so far as the soul of the planet is concerned it is an essential portion of that planet's living body and in this sense is not dead at all.

Its chemical elements, as they resolve themselves slowly back into their planetary accomplices, are part and parcel of that general "body of the earth" which is in a state of constant movement, and which has the "soul of the earth" as its animating principle of personality. And just as the human corpse, when the soul has deserted it, becomes a portion of those chemical elements which are the body of the planet's "personal soul," so do the dead bodies of animals and plants and trees become portions of the same terrestrial bodies.

Thus strictly speaking there is no single moment when any material form or body can be called "dead." Instantaneously with the departure of its own individual soul it is at once "possessed" by the soul of that planetary globe from whose chemistry it drew its elemental life and from whose chemistry, although the form of it has changed, it still draws its life. For it is no fantastic speculation to affirm that every living thing whether human or otherwise plays, while it lives, a triple part upon the world stage.

It is in the first place the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in the second place the medium of the "spiritual vampirizing" of the invisible planetary spirits. And it is in the third place a living portion of that organic elemental chemistry which is the body of the terrestrial soul. Thus it becomes manifest that that "illusion of dead matter" which fills the human soul with so profound a melancholy is no more than an everlasting trick of the malice of the abyss.

And the despair which sometimes results from it is a despair which issues from no "dead matter" but from the terrible living depths of the soul itself. It is from a consideration of the especial kind of melancholy evoked in us by the illusion of "objective deadness" that we are enabled to analyse those peculiar imaginative feelings which sometime or another affect us all. I refer to the extraordinary tenacity with which we cling to our bodily form, however grotesque it may be, and the difficulty we experience in disassociating our living soul from its particular envelope or habitation; and the tendency which we have, in spite of this, to imagine ourselves transferred to an alien body. For the soul in us has the power of "thinking itself" into any other body it may please to select.

And there is no reason why we should be alarmed at such an imaginative power; or even associate its fantastic realization with any terror of madness. The invisible entity within us which says "I am I" can easily be conceived as suddenly awakening out of sleep and discovering, to its astonishment, that its visible body has suffered a bewildering transformation.

Such a transformation can be conceived as almost unlimited in its humorous and disconcerting possibilities. But no such transformation of the external envelope of the soul, whether into the form of an animal or a plant or a god, need be conceived of as necessarily driving us into insanity. The "I am I" would remain the same in regard to its imagination, instinct, intuition, emotion, self-consciousness and the rest. It would be only "changed" in regard to sensation, which is a thing immediately dependent upon the particular and special senses of the human body.

This is a truth to the reality of which the wandering fancies of every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive insolence we are pleased to name "uncivilized." The deeper we dig into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our universe the more vividly do we become aware that our only redemption from sheer insanity lies in "knowing ourselves"; in other words, in keeping a drastic and desperate hold upon what, in the midst of ambiguity and treachery, we are definitely assured of.

And the only thing we are definitely assured of, the only thing which we really know "on the inner side," and with the kind of knowledge which is unassailable, is the reality of our soul. We know this with a vividness completely different from the vividness of any other knowledge because this is not what we feel or see or imagine or think but what we are. And all feeling, all seeing, all imagining and all thinking are only attributes of this mysterious "something" which is our integral self.

To the superficial judgment there is always something weird and arbitrary about this belief in our own soul. And this apparent weirdness arises from the fact that our superficial judgments are the work of reason and sensation arrogating to themselves the whole field of consciousness.

But directly we bring to bear upon this mass of impressions which is our "universe" the full rhythmic play of our complete identity this weirdness and arbitrariness disappear and we realize that we are, not this thought or this sensation or even this stream of thoughts and sensations, but the definite living "monad" which gives these things their only link of continuity and permanence. And it is better to accept experience, even though it refuses to resolve itself into any rational unity, rather than to leave experience in the distance and permit our reason to evolve its desired unity out of its own rules and limitations.

We must readily admit that to take all the attributes of personality and to make them adhere in the mysterious substratum of the soul rather than in the little cells of the brain, seems to the superficial judgment a weird and arbitrary act. But the more closely we think of what we are doing when we make this assumption the more inevitable does such an assumption appear.

We are driven by the necessity of the case to find some "point," or at least some "gap" in thought and the system of things, where mind and matter meet and are fused with one another. Absolute consciousness does not help us to explain the facts of experience; because "facing" absolute consciousness, directly it isolates itself, we are compelled to recognize the presence of "something else," which is the material or object of which absolute consciousness is conscious.

And what we do when we assume the little cells of the physical brain to be the point in space or "the gap in thought" where mind and matter meet and become one is simply to place these two worlds in close juxtaposition and then assert that they are one. But this placing them side by side and asserting that they are one does not make them one. They are just as far apart as ever. The cells of the brain remain material and the phenomenon of consciousness remains immaterial and they are still as remote from one another and as "unfused" as if consciousness were outside of time and space altogether.

It is only when we come to regard the "fusion-point" of these two things as being itself a living and personal thing; it is only when we come to regard the substratum of the soul as a mysterious "something" which is, at one and the same time, both what we call "mind" and what we call "matter," that the difficulty I have described disappears. For in this case we are dealing with something which, unlike the little cells of the brain, is totally invisible and totally beyond all scientific analysis; and yet with something which, because it is affected by bodily sensations and because it is under the sway of time and space, cannot be regarded as utterly outside the realm of material substance. We are in fact, in this case, dealing with something which we feel to be the integral and ultimate reality of ourselves, as we certainly do not feel the little cells of the brain to be; and we are dealing with something that is no mere stream of impressions, but is the concrete permanent reality which gives to all impressions, whether material or immaterial, their unity and coherence.

When once we are put into possession of this, when once we come to recognize our invisible soul as the reality which is our true self, it is found to be no longer ridiculous and arbitrary to endow this soul with all those various attributes, which, after all, are only various aspects of that unique personality which is the personality of the soul. To say "the soul has imagination," or "the soul has instinct," or "the soul has an aesthetic sense," has only a ridiculous sound when under the pressure of the abysmal malice which opposes itself to life we fall into the habits of permitting those usurping accomplices, pure reason and pure sensation, to destroy the rhythmic harmony of the complex vision.

When once we are in full possession of our own soul it is no mere fanciful speculation but an inevitable act of faith which compels us to envisage the universe as a thing crowded with invisible souls, who in some degree or other resemble our own. If this is "anthropomorphism," though strictly speaking it ought to be called "pan-psychism," then it is impossible for us to be too anthropomorphic. For in this way we are doing the only philosophical thing we have a right to do—namely, interpreting the less known in the terms of the more known.

When we seek to interpret the soul, which we vividly know, in terms of chemical or spiritual abstractions of which we have no direct knowledge but which are merely rationalized symbols, we are proceeding in an illegitimate and unphilosophical manner to interpret the more known in terms of the less known, which is in the true sense ridiculous.

The only escape from that profound melancholy so easily engulfed in sheer insanity, which is the result of submission to "the illusion of dead matter," lies in this tenacious hold upon the concrete identity of the soul. So closely are we linked, by reason of the chemistry of our mortal body, to every material-element; that it is only too easy for us to merge our personal life by a perverted use of the imagination in that phantom-world of supposedly "dead matter" which is the illusive projection of the abysmal malice.

Thus just as the soul is driven by extreme physical pain to relinquish its identity and to become "an incarnate sensation," so the soul is driven by the power of malice to relinquish its centrifugal force and to become the very mud and slime and excremental debris which it has endowed with an illusive soullessness.

The clue to the secret pathology of these moods, to whose brink reason and sensation have led us and into whose abyss perverted imagination has plunged us, is therefore to be found in the unfathomable duality of good and evil. If it seems to the kind of mind that demands "rational unity" at all costs, even at the cost of truth to experience, that this duality cannot be left unreconciled, the answer which the philosophy of the complex vision must make, is that any reconciliation of such a sort, any reduction to monistic unity of the eternal adversaries out of whose struggle life itself springs, would bring life itself back to nothingness.

The argument that because, in the eternal process of destruction and creation, life or love or what we call "the good" depends for its activity upon death or malice or what we call "evil," these opposites are one and the same, is shown to be utterly false when one thinks of the analogy of the struggle between the sexes. Because the activity of the male depends upon the existence of the female, that is no reason for concluding that the male and the female are one and the same thing.

Because "good" becomes more "good" out of its conflict with "evil," that does not mean that "good" is responsible for the existence of "evil"; any more than because "evil" becomes more "evil" out of its conflict with "good" does it mean that "evil" is responsible for the existence of "good." Neither is responsible for the existence of the other. They are both positive and real and they are both eternal. They are both unfathomable elements in every personal individual soul, whether of man or plant or animal or god or demi-god that has ever existed or will ever come to exist.

The prevalent idea that because good "in the long run" and over vast spaces of time shows itself to be a little—just a little—more powerful than evil, evil must be regarded as only a form of good or a necessary negation of good is a fallacy derived from the illusion that life is the creation of a "parent" of the universe whose nature is absolutely "good." Such a fallacy takes for granted that somewhere and somehow "Good" will finally triumph over "evil."

The revelation of the complex vision destroys this fallacy. Such a complete triumph of "good" over "evil" would mean the end of everything that exists because everything that exists depends upon this abysmal struggle. But for personalities who are able to recognize that the mere fact of their being alive is already a considerable victory of "good" over "evil," there is nothing overwhelming in the thought that "good" can never completely overcome "evil." It is enough that life has given them life; and that in the perpetually renewed struggle between love and malice they find at the rare moments when love overcomes malice a flood of happiness which, brings with it "the sensation of eternity."

For such souls eternity is here and now; and no anticipated absolute triumph of the "good" in the world over the "evil" can compare for a moment with the indescribable happiness which this "sensation of eternity" brings. It is this happiness, evoked by the rhythmic play of the soul's apex-thought in its supreme hours, which alone, even in memory, can destroy "the illusion of dead matter."

The psychological situation brought about by the fact that this illusion is a perpetually recurrent one and a thing that is always liable to return whenever reason and sensation are driven to isolate themselves is a situation a good deal more complicated than I have so far indicated. It is complicated by the fact that although in certain moods the contemplation of "the illusion of dead matter" produces profound melancholy, in other moods it produces a kind of demonic joy. It seems as though the melancholy mood, which carried to an extreme limit borders on absolute despair, comes about when the creative energy in our soul, although under the momentary dominance of what resists creation, is still, so to speak, the master of our will.

Under such circumstances the will, still resolutely turned towards life, is confronted by what appears to be the very embodiment of death. Under these conditions the will is baffled, perplexed, defeated and outraged. It beats in vain against the "inert mass" which malice has projected; and feels itself powerless to overcome it. It then turns furiously round upon the very substratum of the soul and rends and tears at that, in a mad effort to reach the secret of a phantom-world which seems to hold no secret. If some sort of relief does not come, such relief for instance as physical sleep, the inert misery of the submission of the will, following upon such a desperate struggle, may easily drift into a deadly apathy, may easily approach the borders of insanity.

But there is another condition under which the soul may confront "the illusion of dead matter." This condition comes about when the will, instead of being turned towards creation, is definitely turned towards the opposite of creation. It is impossible for the will to remain in this condition for more than a limited time. Some outward or inward shock, some drastic swing of the psychic pendulum, must sooner or later restore the balance and bring the will back to that wavering and indecisive state—poised like the point of a compass between the two extremes—which seems to be its normal attitude.

Any human will unchangeably directed towards "the good" would be the will of a soul that in its inherent depths were already "absolutely good"; and this, as we have seen, is an impossible phenomenon. The utmost reach of "wickedness" that any soul, whether it be the soul of a man or of a god, can attain to, is a recurrent concentration of the will upon evil and a recurrent overcoming, for relatively increasing spaces of time, of the power of love. This incomplete and constantly interrupted concentration upon evil is the nearest approach to "the worship of Satan" which any will is able to reach. The exquisite pleasure, therefore, culminating in a kind of insane ecstasy, which the soul can enjoy when, in the passion of its evil will, it leaps to welcome "the illusion of dead matter," is a pleasure that in the nature of things cannot last. And the condition of inert malignant apathy which follows such an "ecstasy of evil" is perhaps the nearest approach to a consciousness of "eternal death" which the soul can know.

And it is in this malignant apathy, rather than in the demonic exultation of the mood that preceded it, that the extreme opposite of love finds its culmination. For in its hour of demonic exultation, when the will to evil buries itself with insane joy in "the illusion of dead matter," it is drawing savagely upon the energy of life. It corrupts such energy as it draws upon it and distorts it from its natural functions; but the energy itself, although "possessed" by the abysmal malice, is living and intense; and therefore cannot be regarded as so entirely the opposite of love as that inert condition of malignant lifelessness which inevitably succeeds it.

The demonic ecstasy, full of invincible magnetism, which looks forth from the countenance of a soul obsessed with, evil, has much more in common with the magnetic exultation of a soul possessed with love than has that ghastly inertness, with its insane malignant attraction to death. For out of the countenance of this latter looks forth everything that is hostile to life; and its expression has in it the obscene cunning, mixed with frozen despair, of a corpse which has become utterly dehumanized.

It is frequently a matter of surprise to minds whose view of what is "good" has excluded the concept of energy that persons obviously under the obsession of "evil" are able to display such immense reserves of inexhaustible power. But this surprise disappears when it is realized that such "worshippers of Satan" are drawing upon the creative energy and corrupting it, in the process of drawing upon it, by the malignant power which resists creation.

The "illusion of dead matter" conceived as we have conceived it, as a thing made up of unconscious chemical elements, is after all only one aspect of the phantom-world of illusive soullessness which the abysmal malice delights to project. It is only to particular sensitive natures that this peculiar "despair of the inanimate" takes the form of mud or sand or refuse or water or dead planetary bodies or empty space.

To other natures it may take the form of those innumerable off-shoots of economic necessity, which are not themselves necessary either to human life or human welfare but which are the arbitrary creations of economic avarice divorced from necessity and indulged in out of an inert hatred of what is beautiful and real. Any labour, whether mental or physical, which directly satisfies the economic needs of humanity carries with it the unfathomable thrill of creative happiness. But when we come to consider those innumerable forms of financial and commercial enterprise which in no way satisfy human needs but exist only for the sake of exploitation we find ourselves confronted by a weight of unreal soulless hideousness which by reason of the fact that it is deliberately protected by organized society is a more devastating example of "the thing which is in the way" than any amount of mud and litter and refuse and excremental debris. For this unproductive commercialism, this "unreal reality" projected by the malignant power which resists creation, is not only an obscene outrage to the aesthetic sense; it is actually an assassination of life. When, therefore, a philosopher who uses the complex vision of the soul as his organ of research is asked the question, "where are we to look for the type of human being most entirely evil?" the answer which he is compelled to give is not a little surprising to many minds.

For there are many minds whose physiological timidity corrupts their judgment, and who lack the clairvoyance to unmask with infallible certainty that look of sneering apathy which is the pure expression of malice. And to such minds some wretched devil of a criminal, driven to crime by an insane perversion of the creative instinct—for creation and destruction are not the true opposites— might easily seem the ultimate embodiment of evil.

Whereas the particular type of human being from whom the philosopher of the complex vision would draw his standard of evil would be a type very different from any perverted type even from those whose mania might take the form of erotic cruelty. It would be a type whose recurrent "evil" would take the form of a sneering and malignant inertness, the form of a cold and sarcastic disparagement of all intense feeling. It would be a type entirely obsessed by "the illusion of dead matter"; not so much the "illusion of dead matter" where Nature is concerned, but where the economic struggle has resulted in some unnecessary and purely commercial activity, altogether divorced from the basic necessities of human life. A person of this type would, in his evil moods, be more completely dominated by a malignant resistance to every movement of the creative spirit than any other type, unless it were perhaps one whom the heavy brutality of "officialdom" had blunted into inhuman callousness.

Compared with persons such as these, by whom no actual positive "wickedness" may have ever been perpetrated, the confessed criminal or the acknowledged pervert remains far less committed to the depths of evil. For in persons who have habitually lent themselves to "the illusion of dead matter," whether in regard to Nature or in regard to commercial or financial exploitation, there occurs a kind of "death-in-life" which gives the sneering malignity of the abyss its supreme opportunity, whereas in the souls of those who have committed "crimes," or have been guilty of passionate cruelty, there may easily remain a vivid and sensitive response to some form of reality or beauty, or self-annihilating love.

For "the illusion of dead matter" is the most formidable expression of evil which we know; and it can only be destroyed by the magic of that creative spirit whose true "opposite" is not hatred or cruelty or violence or destruction, but the motiveless power of a deadly obscurantism.

CHAPTER XII.

PAIN AND PLEASURE

Since neither pleasure nor pain can be experienced without consciousness; and since consciousness finds its substratum not in the body but in the soul; we are driven to the conclusion that what we call the capacity of the body for pleasure and pain is really the capacity of the soul for pleasure and pain. But the capacity of the soul for pleasure and pain is not confined to its functioning through the body. Sensation, that is to say, the use of the bodily senses, gives the soul one particular form of pain and one particular form of pleasure; but that the soul possesses other forms of pleasure and pain independently of the body is proved by the psychological fact that intense bodily pain is sometimes accompanied by intense spiritual pleasure and intense bodily pleasure is sometimes accompanied by intense spiritual pain.

What is called "the pursuit of pleasure," that rationalistic abstraction from our real psychological experience, that abstraction which has been made the basis of the false philosophy called "hedonism," cannot stand for a moment against the revelation of the complex vision. Under certain rare and morbid conditions, when reason and sensation, in their conspiracy of assassination, have usurped for a while the whole field of consciousness, such a "pursuit of pleasure" may become a dominant motive. But even under these conditions there often comes a shifting of the stage according to which the pleasure-seeker, sick to death of pleasure, deliberately "pursues" pain.

If it be said that this change is no real change because what is then pursued is the pleasure of "contrast" or even "the pleasure of pain," the retort to such reasoning can only be that in this case the whole hedonistic theory has been given up; for what is really then "pursued" is neither pleasure nor pain but the sensation of novelty or the sensation of new experience.

Pleasure and pain are emotionalized sensations accompanying various physical and mental states. The psychological truth about their "pursuit" is simply that we "pursue" certain objects or conditions because of their immediate attractiveness or "attractive terribleness," and that the accompanying pleasure becomes first a kind of orchestral background to our pursuit; and then, later, becomes, by the action of the law of association, part and parcel of the thing's attractiveness or "attractive terribleness." Thus what really occurs is precisely opposite to the hedonist's contention. For the thing "pursued" swallows up and appropriates to itself the pleasure and pain of the pursuit; and, by the law of association, becomes more vividly, even than at the start the motive force which lures us.

The most ghastly, the most obscene, the most intolerable thing in the world is when the pain of pure sensation, the pain of the body, is accentuated to such a pitch of atrocious suffering that the other attributes of the soul are annihilated; and the humanity of the person thus suffering is temporarily destroyed; so that what "lives" at such a moment is not a person at all but an incarnate pain.

That this ultimate ghastliness, this dehumanization by pain, can only occur where the aboriginal malice of the soul has previously weakened the soul's independent life, is proved by the fact that the most atrocious tortures have been successfully endured, even unto the point of death, by such as have been martyrs for an idea. And the reason of this endurance, the reason why, in the case of such martyrizing, the victim has been able to resist dehumanization is found in the fact that the soul's creative energy or the power of love has been so great that it has been able to assert its independence of bodily torment, even to the last moment of human identity.

Since pain and pleasure, although so often the direct evocation of the soul's attribute of bodily sensation, are always composed of the primordial "stuff" of emotion; and since emotion is a projection of the soul independently of the body, it is natural that the soul should, in the reverse manner, colour its emotion with the memory of sensation. Thus it follows that although it is possible for the soul, when its emotional feeling is outraged or excited, to experience pain or pleasure apart from sensation, there is usually present in such an emotional pain or pleasure a residual element of sensation; for the soul is not a thing which simply "possesses" certain functions; but a thing which is present in some degree or other in all its various aspects of energy.

What we call "memory" is nothing more than the plastic consciousness of personal identity and continuity. And when once the pain or pleasure of a bodily sensation has been lodged in the soul, that pain or pleasure becomes an integral portion of the soul's life, to be worked upon and appropriated for good or evil by the soul's intrinsic duality.

Thus although the creative energy in the soul, emerging from fathomless abysses, can enable the soul to endure until death the most infernal torments, the fact remains that since the attribute of sensation, which depends entirely upon the existence of the bodily senses, is one of the soul's basic attributes and has its ground in the very substratum of the soul, the sensations of pain and pleasure whether coloured by emotion and imagination or left "pure" in the clear element of consciousness, are sensations from which the soul cannot escape.

From this we are forced to conclude that to affirm that the soul can remain wholly untouched and unaffected by bodily pain or pleasure is ridiculous. Bodily pain and pleasure are the soul's pain and pleasure; because the attribute of sensation, through which the bodily senses feed the soul, is not the body's attribute of sensation but the soul's attribute of sensation.

To say, therefore, that the soul can "conquer" the body or be "indifferent" to the body is as ridiculous as to say that the body can "conquer" the soul or be "indifferent" to the soul. The fact that the attribute of sensation is a basic attribute of the soul and that the attribute of sensation is dependent upon the bodily senses must inevitably imply that the pressure or impact of the bodily senses descend to the profoundest depths of the soul.

The thing that "conquers" pain in the invincible martyr is love, or "the energy of creation," in the soul. The abysmal struggle is not between the soul and the body or between the flesh and the spirit, but between the power of life and love, in the body and the soul together, and the power of death or malice, in the body and the soul together.

What we are compelled to assume with regard to those "sons of the universe," whose existence affords a basis for the objectivity of the "ultimate ideas," is that, with them, what I have called "the eternal idea of the body" takes the place in their complex vision of our actual physical body. Their complex vision must be regarded, if our philosophy is to remain boldly and shamelessly anthropomorphic, as possessing, even as our own, the basic attribute of sensation.

But since their essential invisibility, and consequent upon this their ubiquity under the dominant categories of time and place, precludes any possibility of their incarnation, we are compelled to postulate that their complex vision's attribute of sensation, in the absence of any bodily senses, finds its contact with "the objective mystery" and with the objective "universe" in some definite and permanent "intermediary" which serves in their case the same primal necessity as is served in our case by the human body.