If no such "intermediary" existed for them, we should be compelled to relinquish the idea that they possessed a complex vision at all, for not only the attribute of sensation, but the attribute of emotion also, demands for its activity something that shall represent the human body and occupy in their objective "universe" the place occupied by our physical bodies in our "universe."

As we have already shown, this primary demand for the "eternalizing of flesh and blood" is a demand which springs from the profoundest depths of the soul, for it is a demand which springs from the creative energy itself, the eternal protagonist in the world-drama. We must conclude, therefore, that although these super-human children of Nature cannot in the ordinary sense incarnate themselves in flesh and blood they can and do appropriate to themselves out of the surrounding body of the ether, and out of the body of any other living thing they approach, a certain attenuated essence of flesh and blood which, though invisible to us, supplies with them the place of our human body. This, therefore, is the "intermediary" which, in the "invisible companions" of our planetary struggle, occupies the place which is occupied by the physical element in our human life. And this is evoked by nothing less than that "eternal idea of the body," or "that eternal idea of flesh and blood," which the creative energy of love demands. A very curious and interesting possibility follows from this assumption; namely, that by a process which might be called a process of "spiritual vampirizing" the same creative passion which demands satisfaction in the eternalizing of "the idea of the body" actually suffers, by means of its vivid sympathy with living bodies, the very pains and pleasures through which these bodies pass.

The possibility that "the invisible companions," or in more traditional language that the "immortal gods," should be driven by the passion of their creative love, to suffer vicarious pain and pleasure through the living bodies of all organic existences, is a possibility that derives a certain support from two considerations, both of which are drawn directly from human experiences. It is certainly a matter of common human experience to be conscious, for good and for evil, of a kind of obsession of one's body by some sort of spiritual power. We may regard these moments of obsession, with their consequent exhilaration or profound gloom, as due purely to the activity of our own soul; and doubtless very often this is the explanation of them. But it is conceivable also that such obsessions are actually due to the presence near us and around us of the "high immortal ones."

That when we experience this "spiritual vampirizing" of our mortal bodies by immortal companions, such an obsession is not necessarily "for good," is a thing inevitably implied in our primary conception of personality. For although a purely demonic personality is an impossibility, owing to the fact that personality is, in itself, an achieved triumph over evil, it must still remain true that the eternal duality of creation and "what resists creation" must find an arena in the soul of an "immortal" even as it finds an arena in the soul of a "mortal."

Therefore we are driven to regard it as no fantastic speculation but as only too reasonable a possibility, that when a physical depression takes possession of us it is due to this "spiritual vampirizing," in an evil sense, by the power of some immortal whose "malice" at that particular moment has overcome "love." But just as the power of physical pain may be dominated and overcome by the energy of love arising from the depths of our own soul, so this vampirizing by the malice of an "invisible companion," may be dominated and overcome by the energy of love from the depths of our own soul.

It may indeed be regarded as certain that it is when the malice in our own soul is in the ascendant, rather than the love, that we fall victims to this kind of obsession. For evil eternally attracts evil; and it is no wild nor erratic fancy to maintain that the malice in the human soul naturally draws to itself by an inevitable and tragic reciprocity the malice in the souls of the "immortal companions."

The second consideration derived from human experience which supports this view of the vicarious pain and pleasure experienced by the gods through the bodies of all organic entities is the psychological fact of our own attitude towards plants and animals. Any sensitive person among us will not hesitate to admit that in watching animals suffer, he has suffered with such animals; or again, that in watching a branch torn from its trunk, leaving an open wound out of which the sap oozes, he has suffered with the suffering of the tree. And just as the phenomenon of bodily obsession by some immortal god may be either "for good" or "for evil" as our own soul dictates, so the sympathy which we feel for plants and animals may be either "for good" or "for evil."

And this also applies to the relation between these bodiless "immortals" and the bodies of all organic planetary life. According to the revelation of the complex vision, with its emphasis upon the ultimate duality as the supreme secret of life, both pain and pleasure are instruments, in the hands of love, for rousing the soul out of that sleep of death or semi-death which is the abysmal enemy.

The philosophies which oppose pain to pleasure, and insist upon the "good" of pain and the "evil" of pleasure, are no less misleading than the philosophies which oppose flesh to spirit, or matter to mind, calling the one "good" and the other "evil." Such philosophies have permitted that basic attribute of the complex vision which we call conscience to usurp the place occupied, in the total rhythm, by imagination; with the result of a complete falsifying of the essential values.

In a question of such deadly import as this, we have, more than ever, to make our appeal to those rare moments of illumination which we have attained when the rhythmic intensity of the arrow-point of thought was most concentrated and piercing. And the testimony of these moments is given with no uncertain sound. In the great hours of our life, and I think all human experiences justify this statement, both pain and pleasure are transcended and flung into a subordinate and irrelevant place. Something which it is very difficult to describe, a kind of emotion which resembles happiness, flows through us; so that pain and pleasure seem to come and go almost unremarked, like dark and light shadows flung upon some tremendous water-fall.

What we are compelled to recognize, therefore, is that pain and pleasure are both instruments of the creative power of life. They only become evil or are used for purposes of evil, when, by reason of some fatal weakening in the other attributes of the soul, the purely sensational element in them dominates the emotional and they become something most horribly like living entities—entities with bodies composed of the vibrations of torment and souls composed of the substance of torment—and succeed in annihilating the very features of humanity.

Pain and pleasure are not identical with the unfathomable duality which descends into the abyss; for pain and pleasure are definitely and quite unmistakenly fathomable; though, as the gods know well, few enough of the sons of mortals reach the limit of them. They are fathomable; for carried to a certain pitch of intensity they end in ecstasy or they end in death. They are fathomable; for even in the souls of "the immortals" they are only instruments of life warring against death. They are fathomable; because they have one identical root; and this root is the ecstasy of the rhythm of the complex vision which transcends and surpasses them both.

The hideous symbol of "hell" is the creation of the false philosophy which makes the eternal duality resolve itself into flesh and spirit or into soul and body. The power of love renders this symbol meaningless and abortive; for personality is the supreme victory of life over what resists life; and consequently where personality exists "hell" cannot exist; for personality is the scope and boundary of all we know. The symbol of "Satan" also is rendered meaningless by the philosophy of the complex vision; unless such a symbol is used to express those appalling moments when the evil in the soul attracts to itself and associates with itself the evil in the soul of some immortal god.

But just as no mortal can be more evil than good, so also no immortal can be more evil than good, that is to say intrinsically and over a vast space of time. Momentarily and for a limited space of time it is obvious that the human soul can be more evil than good; and by a reasonable analogy it is only too probable that the same thing applies to the invisible sons of the universe. But the philosophy of the complex vision has no place for devils or demons in its world; for the simple reason that at the very moment any soul did become intrinsically and unchangeably evil, at that same moment it would vanish into nothingness, since existence is the product of the struggle between good and evil.

If any soul, whether mortal or immortal, became entirely and absolutely good, it would instantaneously vanish into nothingness. For the life of no kind of living soul is thinkable or conceivable apart from the unfathomable duality. The false philosophy which finds its ideal in an imaginary "parent" of the universe whose goodness is absolute is a philosophy conceived under the furtive influence of the power of evil. For the essence of the power of evil is opposition to the movement of life; and no false ideal has ever done so much injury to the free expansion of life as has been done by this conception of a "parent" of the universe who is a spirit of "absolute goodness."

It is entirely in accordance with the unfathomable cunning of the power of malice that the supreme historic obstacle to the power of love in the human soul should be this conception of a "parent" of the universe, possessed of absolute goodness. In the deepest and most subtle way does this conception oppose itself to the creative energy of love. The creative energy of love demands an indetermined and malleable future. It demands an enemy with which to struggle. It demands the freedom of the individual will. Directly that ancient and treacherous phantom, the "inscrutable mystery" behind the "universe," is allowed to become an object of thought; directly this mystery is allowed to take the shape of a "parent of things" who is to be regarded as "absolutely good," then, at that very moment, the eternal duality ceases to be "eternal" and ceases to be a "duality."

Good and evil become the manifestations of the same inscrutable power. Love and malice become interchangeable names of little meaning. Satan becomes as significant a figure as Christ. All distinctions are then blurred and blotted out. The aesthetic sense is made of no account; or becomes a matter of accidental fancy. Imagination is left with nothing to work upon. The rhythm of the complex vision is broken to pieces. All is permitted. Nothing is forbidden. The universe is reduced to an indiscriminate and formless mass of excremental substance. Indiscriminately we have to swallow the "universe" or indiscriminately we have to let the "universe" alone. There is no longer a protagonist in the great drama, for there is no longer an antagonist. Indeed there is no longer any drama. Tragedy is at an end; and Comedy is at an end. All is equal. Nothing matters. Everything is at once good and evil, beautiful and hideous, true and false. Or rather nothing is beautiful, nothing is true. The "parent of the universe" has satisfied his absolute "goodness" by swallowing up the universe; and there is nothing left for the miserable company of mortal souls to do but to bow their resigned heads and cry "Om! Om!" out of the belly of that unutterable "universal," which by becoming "everything" has become nothing.

This conception of a universal being of "absolute goodness" looms like a colossal corpse in front of all living movement. If instead of "absolute goodness" we say "absolute love," the falseness and deadliness of this conception appears even more unmistakable. For love is the prerogative of personality alone. Apart from personality we cannot conceive of love. And we cannot conceive of personality without the struggle between love and malice. "Absolute love" is a contradiction in terms; for it is the nature of love to be perpetually overcoming malignant opposition; and, in this overcoming, to be perpetually approximating to a far-off ideal which can never be completely reached.

Devils and demons, or elemental entities of unredeemed evil, are unreal enough; and in their unreality dangerous enough to the creative spirit; but far more unreal and far more dangerous than any devil, is this conception of an absolute being whose "goodness" is of so spurious a nature that it obliterates all distinction. This conception of "a parent of the universe" who is responsible for the "eternal duality," but in whom the "eternal duality" is reconciled, blots out all hope for mortal or immortal souls. Between the soul of a man and the soul of an immortal god, as for instance between the soul of a man and the soul of Christ, there may be passionate and enduring love. But between the soul of a man, in whom love is desperately struggling with malice, and this monstrous being in whom love and malice have arrived at some unthinkable reconciliation, there can be no love. There can be nothing but indignant unbelief alternating with profound aversion. Towards any being in whose nature love has been reconciled to malice, the true to the false, the beautiful to the hideous, the good to the evil, there can be no alternative to unbelief, except unmitigated hostility.

It is especially in connection with the atrocious cruelty of physical pain that our conscience and our tastes—unless perverted by some premature metaphysical synthesis or by some morbid religious emotion—reluct at the conception of a "parent" of the universe. Personal love, since it is continually being roused to activity by pain and is continually being expressed through pain and in spite of pain, has come to find in pain, perhaps even more than in pleasure, its natural accomplice. Through the radiant well-being which results from pleasure, love pours forth its influence with a sun-like sweetness and profusion. But from the profound depths of pain, love rises like silence out of a deep sea; and no path of moonlight upon any ocean reaches so far an horizon.

And it is because of this intimate association of love with pain that it is found to be impossible to love any living being who has not experienced pain. Pain can be entirely sensational; and in this case it needs a very passion of love to prevent it becoming obscene and humiliating. But it also can be entirely emotional; in which case it results directly from the struggle of malice with love. When pain is a matter of sensation or of sensationalized emotion, it depends for its existence upon the body. But when pain is entirely emotional it is independent of the body and is a condition of the soul.

As a condition of the soul pain is inevitably associated with the struggle between love and malice. For in proportion as love overcomes malice, pain ceases, and in proportion as malice overcomes love, pain ceases. A human being entirely free from emotional pain is a human being in whom love has for the moment completely triumphed; or a human being in whom malice has for the moment completely triumphed. There is an exultation of love which fills the soul with irresistible magnetic power, so that it can redeem the universe. There is also an exultation of malice which fills the soul with irresistible magnetic power, so that it can corrupt the universe. In both these extreme cases—and they are cases of no unfrequent occurrence in all deep souls—emotional pain ceases to exist.

Emotional pain is the normal condition of the human soul; because the normal condition of the human soul is a wavering and uncertain struggle between love and malice; but although love may overcome malice, or malice may overcome love, with relative completeness, they neither of them can overcome the other with absolute completeness. There must always remain in the depths of the soul a living potentiality; which is the love or the malice which has been for the moment relatively overcome by its opposite. And just as pain can be both emotional and sensational so pleasure can be both emotional and sensational. Pleasure, like pain, can be a thing of bodily sensation alone; in which case it tends to become a thing of degrading and humiliating reality. A human entity entirely obsessed by physical pleasure is a revolting and obscene spectacle. Even with animals it is only when their sensation of pleasure is in some degree emotionalized that we can endure to contemplate it with sympathy.

The soul of an animal is capable of being "de-animalized" in just as horrible a way by a pure sensation as the soul of a man is capable of being "de-humanized" by a pure sensation. The sexual sensation of pleasure carried to the extreme limit "de-animalizes" animals as it "de-humanizes" human beings; because it drowns the consciousness of personality. There is an ecstasy when personality loses itself and finds itself again in a deeper personality. There is also an ecstasy where personality loses itself in pure sensation. In the region of sexual sensation, just as in the region of sexual emotion, it is love alone which is able to hold fast to personality in the midst of ecstasy; or which is able to merge personality in a deeper personality.

It is because of love's intimate association with pain that we are unable, except under the morbid pressure of some metaphysical or religious illusion, to regard the imaginary "parent of the universe" with anything but hostility. Both pain and pleasure are associated with the unfathomable duality. And although the unfathomable duality descends into abysses beyond the reach of both of these, yet we cannot conceive of either of them existing apart from this struggle.

But there can be no duality, as there can be no struggle, in the soul of a being in whom love has absolutely overcome malice. Therefore in such a soul there can be no pain. And for a soul incapable of feeling pain we can feel no love. It is of course obvious that this whole problem is an imaginary one. We are not really confronted with the alternative of loving or hating the unruffled soul of this absolute one. And we are not confronted with this problem for the simple reason that such a soul does not exist. And it does not exist because every soul, together with the "universe" created by every soul, depends for its existence upon this ultimate struggle.

It is from a consideration of the nature of pain and pleasure that we attain the clue to the ultimate duality. Pain and pleasure are conditions of the soul; conditions which have a definite and quite fathomable limit. Malice and love are conditions of the soul; conditions which have no definite limit, but which descend into unfathomable depths. Extremity of malice sinks down to an abyss where pain and pleasure are lost and merged in one another. Extremity of love sinks down to an abyss where pain and pleasure are lost and merged in one another. But just as, apart from the individual soul which is their possessor, pain and pleasure have no existence at all; so, apart from the individual soul which is the arena of their struggle, malice and love have no existence at all. Because we speak of pain and pleasure as if they were "things in themselves" and of malice and love as if they were "things in themselves" this can never mean more than that they are eternal conditions of the soul which is their habitation.

Apart from a personal soul, "love" has no meaning and cannot be said to exist. Apart from a personal soul, "life" has no meaning and cannot be said to exist. There is no such thing as the "love-force" or the "life-force," any more than there is such a thing as the "malice-force" or the "death-force," apart from some personal soul. The "life-force" is a condition of the soul which carried to an extreme limit results in ecstasy. The "death-force" is a condition of the soul which carried to an extreme limit results in ecstasy. Beyond these two ecstasies there is nothing but total annihilation; which would simply mean that the soul had become absolutely "good" or absolutely "evil."

What we call the "death-force" in the soul does not imply real death, until it has reached a limit beyond ecstasy. It implies a malignant resistance to life which may be carried to a point of indescribable exultation. As I have already hinted there is a profound association between the duality of love and malice and the duality of pain and pleasure. But it would be false to our deepest experience to say that love implies pleasure and that malice implies pain. As a matter of fact, they both imply a thrilling and ecstatic pleasure, in proportion as the equilibrium between them, the balance of the wavering struggle between them, is interrupted by the relative victory of either the one or the other.

The relative victory of malice or of the "death-force" over love or over the "life-force" is attended by exquisite and poignant pleasure, a pleasure which culminates in unutterable ecstasy. The shallow ethical thinkers who regard "evil" as a negation are obviously thinkers whose consciousness has never penetrated into the depths of their own souls. Pain and pleasure for such thinkers must be entirely sensationalized. They cannot have experienced, to any profound depth, the kind of pain and pleasure which are purely emotional.

The condition of the soul which gives itself up to the "death-force" or to the malignant power which resists creation may be sometimes a condition of thrilling and exultant pleasure. As we have already indicated, the normal condition of the soul, wavering and hesitating between good and evil, is liable to be changed into a profound melancholy, when it is confronted by the "illusion of dead matter." But, as we have also discovered, if, in the soul thus contemplating the "illusion of dead matter," evil is more potent than good, there may be a thrilling and exquisite pleasure.

The "death-force" in our own soul leaps in exultation to welcome the "death illusion" in material objects. Upon this illusion, which it has itself projected, it rejoices to feed. There is a "sweet pain" in the melancholy it thus evokes; a "sweet pain" that is more delicate than any pleasure; and it is a mistake to assume that even the insanity which this aberration may result in is necessarily an insanity of distress. It may be an insanity of ecstasy. All this is profoundly associated with the aesthetic sense; and we may note that the diabolical exultation with which many great artists and writers fling themselves upon the obscene, the atrocious, the cruel and the abominable, and derive exquisite pleasure from representing these things is not an example of the love in them overcoming the malice but an example of the "death-force" in them leaping to respond to the death-force in the universe.

It is just here that we touch one of the profoundest secrets of the aesthetic sense. I refer to that condition of the soul when the creative energy which is life and love, suffers an insidious corruption by the power which resists creation and which is malice and death. This psychological secret, although assuming an aesthetic form, is closely associated with the sexual instinct.

The sexual instinct, which is primarily creative, may easily, by the insidious corruption of the power which resists creation, become a vampirizing force of destruction. It may indeed become something worse than destruction. It may become an abysmal and unutterable "death-in-life." That voluptuous "pleasure in cruelty" which is an intrinsic element of the sexual instinct may attach itself to "the pleasure in death" which is the intrinsic emotion of the aboriginal inert malice; or rather the "pleasure in death" of the adversary of creation may insidiously associate itself with the "pleasure in cruelty" of the sexual instinct and make of "this energy of cruelty" a new and terrible emotion which is at once cruel and inert.

All this were mere fantastic speculation if it lacked touch with direct experience. But direct experience, if we have any psycho-clairvoyance at all, bears unmistakable witness to what I have been saying. If one glances at the expression in the countenance of any human soul who is deriving pleasure from the spectacle of suffering and who, under the pressure of this queer fusion of the aesthetic sense with the abysmal malice, is engaged in vampirizing the victim of such suffering one will observe a very curious and very illuminating series of revelations.

One will observe, for instance, the presence of demonic energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what is atrocious, obscene, monstrous and revolting, is the result of a corruption of both the sexual instinct and the aesthetic sense by the abysmal malice.

For the pleasure which such souls derive from the contemplation of suffering is identical with the pleasure they derive from contemplating the "illusion of dead matter." Philosophers who give themselves up to the profoundest pessimism do not do so, as a rule, under the influence of love. The only exceptions to this are rare cases when preoccupation with suffering does not spring from a furtive enjoyment of the spectacle of suffering but from an incurable pity for the victims of suffering. Such exceptions are far more rare than is usually supposed, because the self-preservative hypocrisy of most pessimists enables them to conceal their voluptuousness under the mask of pity.

Nor must we hide from ourselves the fact that even pity, which in its pure form is the very incarnation of love, has a perverted form in which it lends itself to every kind of subterranean cruelty. Our psychological insight does not amount to very much if it does not recognize that there is a form of pity which enhances the pleasure of cruelty. There may indeed be discovered, when we dig deep enough into the abysses of the soul, an aspect of pity which thrills us with a most delicate sensation of tenderness and yet which remains an aspect of pity by no means incompatible with the fact that we continue the process of causing pain to the object of such tenderness.

Of all human emotions the emotion of pity is capable of the most divergent subtleties. The only kind of pity which is entirely free from the ambiguous element of "pleasure in cruelty" is the pity which is only another name for love, when love is confronted by suffering. There is such a thing as a suppressed envy of "the pleasure of cruelty" manifested in the form of moral indignation against the perpetrator of such cruelty.

Such moral indignation, with its secret impulse of suppressed unconscious jealousy, is a very frequent phenomenon when any sexual element enters into the cruelty in question. But the psychologist who has learnt his art from the profoundest of all psychologists—I mean the Christ of the gospels—is not deceived by this moral gesture. He is able to detect the infinite yearning of the satyr under the righteous fury of the moral avenger.

And he has an infallible test at hand by which to ascertain whether the emotion he feels is pure or impure pity; whether in other words it is merely a process of delicate vampirizing, or whether it is the creative sympathy of love. And the test which he has at his disposal is nothing less than his attitude towards the perpetrator of the particular cruelty under discussion. If his attitude is one of implacable revenge he may be sure that his pity is something else than the emotion of love. If his attitude is one which implies pity not only for the victim but also for the victim's torturer—who without question has more need for pity—then he may be sure that his attitude is an attitude of genuine love.

The mood of implacable revenge need not necessarily imply a suppressed jealousy or envy; but it certainly implies the presence of an element which has its origin in the sinister side of the great duality. The pleasure which certain minds derive from a contemplation of the "deadness of matter" is closely associated with the voluptuousness of cruelty drawn from the recesses of the sexual instinct. Such cruelty finds one of its most insidious incentives in the phenomenon of humiliation; and when the philosopher contemplates the "deadness of matter" with exquisite satisfaction, the pleasure which he experiences, or the "sweet pain" which he experiences, is very closely connected with the cruel idea of humiliating the pride of the human soul.

The duality of pleasure and pain helps us to understand the nature of the duality of good and evil, for it helps us to realize that good and evil are not separate independent existences; but are—like pleasure and pain—emotional conditions of the soul. Thus when we say that the ultimate duality of good and evil, or of creation and what resists creation, is the thing upon which the whole universe depends, we must not for a moment be supposed to mean that the ultimate reality of the universe consists of two opposed "forces" who, like blind chemical energies, struggle with one another in unconscious darkness.

The ultimate reality of the universe is personality, or rather, let us say, is the existence of an innumerable company of personal souls, visible and invisible, each of whom half-creates and half-discovers his own universe; each of whom finds, sooner or later, in the objective validity of the "eternal ideas," a universe which is common to them all. The unfathomable duality upon which this objective world, common to them all, depends for its existence is a duality which exists in every separate soul. Without such a duality it is impossible to conceive any soul existing. And directly such a duality were resolved into unity such a soul would cease to exist. But because, without the presence of evil, good would cease to exist, we have no right to say that evil is an aspect of good. We have no right to say this because, if good is dependent for its existence upon evil, it is equally true that evil is dependent for its existence upon good.

The whole question of ultimate issues is a purely speculative one and one that does not touch the real situation. The real situation, the real fact of our personal experience—which is the only experience worth anything—lies undoubtedly in this impression of unfathomable duality. It cannot be regarded as a reconciliation between love and malice merely to recognize that love and malice are not independent "forces," such as can be compared to chemical "forces," but are states of the soul.

It is true that they both exist within the soul, just as the soul exists within time and space; but since the soul is unfathomable these two conditions of the soul are also unfathomable. The struggle upon which the universe depends is a struggle which goes on within the circle of personality; but since personality is unthinkable without this struggle, it may truly be said that the existence of personality "depends" upon the existence of this struggle. When we speak of pain and pleasure as if they were independent entities we are forgetting that it is merely as "states of the soul" that pain and pleasure exist. When we speak of love and malice as independent entities we are forgetting that it is merely as "states of the soul" that love and malice exist. Love and malice, the life-force and the death-force, these are merely abstractions when separated from the soul which is their arena.

It is certainly not in harmony with the revelation of the complex vision to seek to imagine some vague "beginning of things"; when some inscrutable chemical or spiritual "energy," called "life," rushed into objective existence and proceeded to create living personalities through which it might be able to function.

The revelation of the complex vision is a revelation of a world made up of unfathomable personalities. Of this world, of these unfathomable personalities, we are unable to postulate any "beginning." They have always existed. They seem likely to remain always in existence. Our knowledge stops at that point; because our knowledge is the knowledge of personality. The revelation of the complex vision is constantly warning us against any tendency to evade the whole question of the original mystery by the use of meaningless abstractions.

The word "energy" is such an abstraction. So also is the word "movement." So also are those logical formulae of the pure reason, such as the "a priori unity of apperception" and the "absolute spirit." Apart from personality, apart from the complex vision of the individual soul, there is no such thing as "energy" or "movement" or "transcendental unity" or "absolute spirit." In the same way we are compelled to recognize that apart from personality the unfathomable duality has no meaning. But in so far as it represents the eternal struggle between life and death which goes on all the while in every living soul, the unfathomable duality is the permanent condition of our deepest knowledge.

It is just here that the mystery of pain and pleasure helps us to understand the mystery of love and malice, the same insensitiveness in certain souls that prevents their feeling any vivid pain or any vivid pleasure, also prevents their feeling any intense malice. But this insensitiveness which prevents their feeling any intense malice is, more than anything else, the especial evocation of the power of malice. For intensity, even in malice, is a proof that malice has been appropriating to its use the energy of life. The real opposite of intense love is not intense malice but inert malice.

For malignant inertness is the true adversary of creation. From this it necessarily follows that the soul which is insensitive to pain and pleasure and to malice and love is a soul in whom the profound opposite of love has already won a relative victory. It is certainly possible, as we have seen, for the victory of malice over love to be accompanied by thrilling pleasure; but, when this happens malice has lost something of its "inertness" by drawing to itself and corrupting for its own use the dynamic energy of love. When malice displays itself in an intense and vivid activity of destruction it is less "evil" and less purely "malignant" than when it remains insensitive and inert. For this reason it is undeniably true that an insensitive person, although he may cause much less positive pain than a passionately cruel person, is in reality a more complete incarnation of the power of "evil" than the latter; for the latter, in the very violence of his passion, has appropriated to himself something of the creative energy. It is true that in appropriating this he has corrupted it, and it is true that by the use of it he can cause far more immediate pain; but it remains that in himself he is less purely "evil" than the person whose chief characteristic is a malignant insensitiveness.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE REALITY OF THE SOUL IN RELATION TO MODERN THOUGHT

It ought not to be forgotten, as at least an important historical fact, in regard to what we have asserted as the revelation of the complex vision concerning the reality of the soul, that the two most influential modern philosophers deny this reality altogether. I refer to Bergson and William James.

In the systems of thought of both these writers there is no place left for that concrete, real, actual "monad," with its semi-mental, semi-material substratum of unknown hyper-physical, hyper-psychic substance, which is what we mean, in philosophical as well as in popular language when we talk of the "soul."

According to the revelation of man's complex vision this hyper-physical, hyper-psychic "something," which is the concrete centre of will and consciousness and energy, is also the invisible core or base of what we term personality, and, without its real existence, personality can have no permanence. Without the assumption of its real existence personality cannot hold its own or remain integral and identical in the midst of the process of life.

This then being the nature and character of the soul, what weight is there in the arguments used against the soul's concrete existence by such thinkers as James and Bergson? The position of the American philosopher in regard to this matter seems less plausible and less consistent than that of his French master.

James is prepared to give his adherence to a belief in a soul of the earth and in planetary souls and stellar souls. He quotes with approval on this point the writings of Gustav Theodor Fechner, the Leipzig chemist. He is also prepared to find a place in his pluralistic world for at least one quite personal and quite finite god.

If he is not merely exercising his philosophical fancy in all this, but is actually prepared to assume the real concrete existence of an earth-soul and of planetary souls and of at least one beneficent and quite personal god, why should he find himself unable to accept the same sort of real concrete soul in living human beings? Why should he find himself compelled to say—"the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophers has fallen upon evil days and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers . . . like the word 'cause' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap . . . it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy . . . let us leave out the soul, then, and confront the original dilemma"?

This scepticism of the pragmatic philosophy in regard to the "substantial soul" is surely an unpardonable inconsistency. For in all other problems the fact of an idea being "freely used by common men" is, according to pragmatic principles, an enormous piece of evidence in its favour. The further fact that all the great "a priori" metaphysical systems have been driven by their pure logic to discredit the "substantiality" of the soul, just as they have been driven to discredit the personality of God, ought, one would think, where "radical empiricism" is concerned, to be a still stronger piece of evidence on the soul's side.

James has told us that he has found it necessary to throw away "pure reason" and to assume an inherent "irrationality" in the system of things. Why then, when it comes to this particular axiom of irrational common-sense, does he balk and sheer off?

One cannot resist the temptation of thinking that just here the great Pragmatist has been led astray by that very philosophical pride he condemns in the metaphysicians. One cannot help suspecting that it is nothing less than the fact of the soul's appeal to ordinary common-sense that has prejudiced this philosopher of common-sense so profoundly against it.

What James does not seem to see is that his pseudo-scientific reduction of the integral soul-monad into a wavering and fitful series of compounded vortex-consciousness is really a falling back from the empirical data of human reality into the thin abstracted air of conceptual truth. The concrete substantial soul, just because it is the permanent basis of personality and the only basis of personality which common sense can apprehend, is precisely one of those obstinate original particular "data" of consciousness which it is the proud role of conceptual and intellectual logic to explain away, and to explain away in favour of attenuated rationalistic theories which are themselves "abstracted" or, shall we say, pruned and shaved off from the very thing they are supposed to explain.

All these "flowing streams," and "pulses of consciousness" and multiple "compoundings of consciousness" and overlappings of sub-consciousness are in reality, for all their pseudo-scientific air, nothing more or less than the old-fashioned metaphysical conceptions, such as "being" and "becoming," under a new name.

Nor is the new "irrational reason" by which the pragmatist arrives at these plausible theories really in the least different from the imaginative personal vision which, as James himself clearly shows, was at the back of all that old-fashioned dialectic.

The human mind has not changed its inherent texture; nor can it change it. We may talk of substituting intuition for reason. But the "new intuition," with its arrogant claims of getting upon the "inner side" of reality, is after all only "the old reason" functioning with a franker admission of its reliance upon that immediate personal vision and with less regard for the logical rules.

It is not, in fact, because of any rule of "logical identity with itself" that the human mind clings so tenaciously to the notion of an integral soul-monad. It is because of its own inmost consciousness that such a monad, that such a substantial integral soul, is in the deepest sense its very self, and a denial of it a denial of its very self.

The attitude of Bergson in this matter is much more consistent than that of James. Bergson is frankly and confessedly not a pluralist at all, but a spiritual monist. As a spiritual monist he is compelled to regard what we call "matter," including in this term the mechanical or chemical resistance of body and brain, as something which is produced or evolved or "thrown off" by spirit and as something which, when once it has been evolved, spirit has to penetrate, permeate, and render porous and submissive.

The complexity of Bergson's speculations with regard to memory and the "elan vital," with regard above all to the "true time," has done much to distract popular attention away from his real attitude towards the soul. But Bergson's attitude towards the existence of a substantial soul-monad is consistently and inevitably hostile.

It could not be anything else as long as the original personal "fling" into life which gives each one of us his peculiar angle of vision remained with him a question of one unified spirit—"a continuum of eternal shooting-forth"—which functioned through the brain and through all personal life and perpetually created a new unforeseen universe.

In the flux of this one universal "spirit," whereof "duration," in the mysterious Bergsonian sense, is the functional activity, there can obviously be no place for an actual substantial soul. "The consciousness we have of our own self in its continual flux introduces us to the interior of a reality on the model of which we must represent other realities. All reality, therefore, is a tendency, if we agree to mean by tendency an incipient change in any direction." And when we enquire as to the nature of this "continual flux" of which the positive and integral thing we have come to call the soul is but a ripple, or swirling whirlpool of centripetal ripples, the answer which Bergson gives is definite enough. "We approach a duration which strains, contracts, and intensifies itself more and more; at the limit would be eternity. No longer conceptual eternity, which is an eternity of death, but an eternity of life. A living, and therefore still moving eternity in which our own particular duration would be included, as the vibrations are in light; an eternity which would be the concentration of all duration, as materiality is its dispersion. Between these two extreme limits intuition moves, and this movement is the very essence of metaphysics."

Thus according to Bergson the essential secret of life is to be found in some peculiar movement of what he calls spirit; a movement which takes place in some unutterable medium, or upon some indescribable plane, the name of which is "pure time" or "duration."

And listening to all this we cannot resist a sigh of dismay. For here, in these vague de-humanized terms—"tendency," "flux," "eternity," "vibration," "duration," "dispersion"—we are once more, only with a different set of concepts, following the old metaphysical method, that very method which Bergson himself sets out to confine to its inferior place. "Tendency" or "flux" or "duration" is just as much a metaphysical concept as "being" or "not being" or "becoming."

The only way in which we can really escape from the rigid conceptualism of rational logic is to accept the judgment of the totality of man's nature. And the judgment of the totality of man's nature points unmistakably to the existence of a real substantial soul. Such a soul is the indispensable implication of personality. And the most interior and intimate knowledge that we are in possession of, or shall ever be in possession of, is the knowledge of personality.

Bergson is perfectly right when he asserts that "the consciousness which we have of our own self" introduces us "to the interior of a reality, on the model of which we must represent other realities." But Bergson is surely departing both from the normal facts of ordinary introspection and from the exceptional facts of abnormal illumination when he appends to the words "the consciousness which we have of our own self" the further words in its continual "flux." For in our normal moods of human introspection, as well as in our abnormal moods of superhuman illumination, what we are conscious of most of all is a sense of integral continuity in the midst of change, and of identical permanence in the midst of ebb and flow.

The flux of things does most assuredly rush swiftly by us; and we, in our inmost selves, are conscious of life's incessant flow. But how could we be conscious of any of this turbulent movement across the prow of our voyaging ship, if the ship itself—the substantial base of our living consciousness—were not an organized and integral reality, of psycho-chemical material, able to exert will and to make use of memory and reason in its difficult struggle with the waves and winds?

The revelation of man's complex vision with regard to the personality of the soul is a thing of far-reaching issues and implications. One of these implications is that while we have the right to the term "the eternal flux" in regard to the changing waves of sensations and ideas that pass across the horizon of the soul's vision we have no right to think of this "eternal flux" as anything else than the pressure upon us of the universe of our own vision and the pressure upon us of the universe of other visions, as they seem, for this or that passing moment, to be different from our own.

The kind of world to which we are thus committed is a world crowded with living personalities. Each of these personalities brings with it its own separate universe. But the fact that all these separate universes find their ideal synthesis or teleological orientation in "the vision of the immortals," justifies us in assuming that in a certain eternal sense all these apparently conflicting universes are in reality one. This unity of ideas, with its predominant aesthetic idea—the idea of beauty—and its predominant emotional idea—the idea of love—helps us towards a synthesis which is after all only a dynamic one, a thing of movement, growth and creation.

Such a teleological unity, forever advancing to a consummation never entirely to be attained, demands however some sort of static "milieu" as well as some sort of static "material" in the midst of which and out of which it moulds its premeditated future. It is precisely this static "milieu" or "medium," and this static "material" or formless "objective mystery," which Bergson's philosophy, of the "elan vital" of pure spirit, spreading out into a totally indetermined future, denies and eliminates.

In order to justify this double elimination—the elimination of an universal "medium" and the elimination of a formless "thing-in-itself"—Bergson is compelled to reduce space to a quite secondary and merely logical conception and to substitute for our ordinary stream of time, measurable in terms of space, an altogether new conception of time, measurable in terms of feeling.

When however we come to analyse this new Bergsonian time, or as he prefers to call it "intuitively-felt duration," we cannot avoid observing that it is merely a new "mysterious something" introduced into the midst of the system of things, in order to enable us to escape from those older traditional "mysterious somethings" which we have to recognize as the "immediate data" of human consciousness.

It might be argued that Bergson's monistic "spirit," functioning in a mysterious indefinable "time," demands neither more nor less of an irrational act of faith than our mysterious psycho-material "soul" surrounded by a mysterious hyper-chemical "medium" and creating its future out of an inexplicable "objective mystery."

Where however the philosophy of the complex vision has the advantage over the philosophy of the "elan vital" is in the fact that even on Bergson's own admission what the human consciousness most intensely knows is not "pure spirit," whether shaped like a fan or shaped like a sheaf, but simply its own integral identity. And this integral identity of consciousness can only be visualized or felt in the mind itself under the form of a living concrete monad.

It will be seen, however, when it comes to a "showing up" of what might be called the "trump cards" of axiomatic mystery, that the complex vision has in reality fewer of these ultimate irrational "data" than has the philosophy of the elan vital.

Space itself, whether we regard it as objective or subjective, is certainly not an irrational axiom but an entirely rational and indeed an entirely inevitable assumption. And what the complex vision reveals is that the trinity of "mysterious somethings" with which we are compelled to start our enquiry, namely the "something" which is the substratum of the soul, the "something" which is the "medium" binding all souls together, and the "something" which is the "objective mystery" out of which all souls create their universe, is, in fact, a genuine trinity in the pure theological sense; in other words is a real "three-in-one." And it is a "three-in-one" not only because it is unthinkable that three "incomprehensible substances" should exist in touch with one another without being in organic relation, but also because all three of them are dominated, in so far as we can say anything about them at all, by the same universal space.

It is true that the unappropriated mass of "objective mystery" upon which no shadow of the creative energy of any soul has yet been thrown must be considered as utterly "formless and void" and thus in a sense beyond space and time, yet since immediately we try to imagine or visualize this mystery, as well as just logically "consider" it, we are compelled to extend over it our conception of time and space, it is in a practical sense, although not in a logical sense, under the real dominion of these.

When therefore the philosophy of the complex vision places its trump-cards of axiomatic mystery over against the similar cards of the philosophy of the "elan vital" it will be found that in actual number Bergson has one more "card" than we have. For Bergson has not only his "pure spirit" and his "intuitively-felt time," but has also—for he cannot really escape from that by just asserting that his "spirit" produces it—the opposing obstinate principle of "matter" or "solid bodies" or "mechanical brains" upon which his pure spirit has to work.

It is indeed out of its difficulties with "matter," that is to say with bodies and brains, that Bergson's "spirit" is forced to forego its natural element of "intuitive duration" and project itself into the rigid rationalistic conceptualism of ordinary science and metaphysic.

The point of our argument in this place is that since the whole purpose of philosophy is articulation or clarification and since in this process of clarification the fewer "axiomatic incomprehensibles" we start with the better; it is decidedly to the advantage of any philosophy that it should require at the start nothing more than the mystery of the individual soul confronting the mystery of the world around it. And it is to the disadvantage of Bergson's philosophy that it should require at the start, in addition to "pure spirit" with its assumption of memory and will, and "pure matter" with its assumption of ordinary space and ordinary time, a still further axiomatic trump-card, in the theory of intuitive "durational" time, in which the real process of the life-flow transcends all reason and logic.

Putting aside however the cosmological aspect of our controversy with the "radical empirical" school of thought, we still have left unconsidered our most serious divergence from their position. This consists in the fact that both Bergson and James have entirely omitted from their original instrument of research that inalienable aspect of the human soul which we call the aesthetic sense.

With only a few exceptions—notably that of Spinoza—all the great European philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have begun their philosophizing from a starting-point which implied, as an essential part of their "organum" of enquiry, the possession by the human soul of some sort of aesthetic vision.

To these thinkers, whether rationalistic or mystic, no interpretation of the world seemed possible that did not start with the aesthetic sense, both as an instrument of research and as a test of what research discovered.

The complete absence of any discussion of the aesthetic sense in Bergson and James is probably an historic confession of the tyranny of commercialism and physical science over the present generation. It may also be a spiritual reflection, in the sphere of philosophy, of the rise to political and social power of that bourgeois class which, of all classes, is the least interested in aesthetic speculation.

The philosophy of the complex vision may have to wait for its hour of influence until the proletariat comes into its own. And it does indeed seem as if between the triumph of the proletariat and the triumph of the aesthetic sense there were an intimate association. It is precisely because these two philosophers have so completely neglected the aesthetic sense that their speculations seem to have so little hold upon the imagination. When once it is allowed that the true instrument of research into the secret of the universe is the rhythmic activity of man's complete nature, and not merely the activity of his reason or the activity of his intuition working in isolation, it then becomes obvious that the universal revelations of the aesthetic sense, if they can be genuinely disentangled from mere subjective caprices, are an essential part of what we have to work with if we are to approach the truth.

The philosophy of the complex vision bases its entire system upon its faith in the validity of these revelations; and, as we have already shown, it secures an objective weight and force for this ideal vision by its faith in certain unseen companions of humanity, whom it claims the right to name "the immortals."

This is really the place where we part company with Bergson and James. We agree with the former in his distrust of the old metaphysic. We agree with the latter in many of his pluralistic speculations. But we feel that any philosophy which refuses to take account, at the very beginning, of those regions of human consciousness which are summed up by the words "beauty" and "art," is a philosophy that in undertaking to explain life has begun by eliminating from life one of its most characteristic products.

In Bergson's interpretation of life the stress is laid upon "spirit" and "intuition." In James' interpretation of life the stress is laid upon those practical changes in the world and in human nature which any new idea must produce if it is to prove itself true.

In the view of life we are now trying to make clear, philosophy is so closely dependent upon the activity of the aesthetic sense that it might itself be called an art, the most difficult and the most comprehensive of all the arts, the art of retaining the rhythmic balance of all man's contradictory energies. What this rhythmic balance of man's concentrated energies seems to make clear is the primary importance of the process of discrimination and valuation.

From the profoundest depths of the soul rises the consciousness of the power of choice; and this power of choice to which we give, by common consent, the name of "will," finds itself confronted at the start by the eternal duality of the impulse to create and the impulse to resist creation. The impulse to create we find, by experience, to be identical with the emotion of love. And the impulse to resist creation we find, by experience, to be identical with the emotion of malice.

But experience carries us further than this. The impulse to create, or the emotion of love, is found, as soon as it begins a function, to be itself a living synthesis of three primordial reactions to life, which, in philosophic language, we name "ideas." These three primordial ideas may be summed up as follows: The idea of beauty, which is the revelation of the aesthetic sense. The idea of goodness or nobility, which is the revelation of conscience. The idea of truth, or the mind's apprehension of reality, which is the revelation of reason, intuition, instinct, and imagination, functioning in sympathic harmony. Now it is true that by laying so much stress upon the "elan vital" or flowing tide of creative energy, Bergson has indicated his acceptance of one side of the ultimate duality. But for Bergson this creative impulse is not confronted by evil or by malice as its opposite, but simply by the natural inertness of mechanical "matter."

And once having assumed his "continuum" of pure spirit, he deals no further with the problem of good and evil or with the problem of the aesthetic sense.

From our point of view he is axiomatically unable to deal with these problems for the simple reason that his elan vital or flux of pure spirit, being itself a mere metaphysical abstraction from living personality, can never, however hard you squeeze it, produce either the human conscience or the human aesthetic sense.

These things can only be produced from the concrete activity of a real living individual soul. In the same way it is true that William James, by his emphasis upon conduct and action and practical efficiency as the tests of truth, is bound to lay enormous stress at the very start upon the ethical problem.

What a person believes about the universe becomes itself an ethical problem by the introduction on the one hand of the efficiency of the will to believe and on the other of the assumption that a person "ought" to believe that which it is "useful" to him to believe, as long as it does not conflict with other desirable truths. But this ethical element in the pragmatic doctrine, though it is so dominant as almost to reduce philosophy itself to a sub-division of ethics, is not, when one examines it, at all the same thing as what the philosophy of the complex vision means by the revelation of conscience.

Ethics with William James swallows up philosophy and in swallowing up philosophy the nature of Ethics is changed and becomes something different from the clear unqualified mandate of the human conscience. With the philosophy of the complex vision the revelations of conscience are intimately associated with the revelations of the aesthetic sense; and these again, in the rhythmic totality of man's nature, with the revelations of emotion, instinct, intuition, imagination.

Thus when it comes to conduct and the question of choice the kind of "imperative" issued by conscience has been already profoundly changed. It is still the mandate of conscience. But it is the mandate of a conscience whose search-light has been taken possession of by the aesthetic sense and has been fed by imagination, instinct and intuition.

It must be understood when we speak of these various "aspects" or "attributes" of the human soul we do not imply that they exist as separable faculties independently of the unity of the soul which possesses them.

The soul is an integral and indivisible monad and throws its whole strength along each of these lines of contact with the world. As will, the soul flings itself upon the world in the form of choice between opposite valuations. As conscience, it flings itself upon the world in the form of motive force of opposite valuations. As the aesthetic sense, it flings itself upon the world in the form of yet another motive-force of opposite valuations. As imagination, it half-creates and half-discovers the atmospheric climate, so to speak, of this valuation. As intuition, it feels itself to be in possession of a super-terrestrial, super-human authority which gives objective definiteness and security to this valuation. As instinct, it feels its way by an innate clairvoyance into the organic or biological vibrations of this valuation.

Thus we return to the point from which we started, namely that the whole problem of philosophy is the problem of valuation. And this is the same thing as saying that philosophy, considered in its essential nature, is nothing less than art—the art of flinging itself upon the world with all the potentialities of the soul functioning in rhythmic harmony.

When Bergson talks of the "elan vital" and suggests that the acts of choice of the human personality are made as naturally and inevitably, under the pressure of the "shooting out" of the spirit, as leaves grow upon the tree, he is falling into the old traditional blunder of all pantheistic and monistic thinkers, the blunder namely of attributing to a universal "God" or "life-force" or "stream of tendency" the actual personal achievements of individual souls.

Bergson's "apologia" for free-will is therefore rendered ineffective by reason of the fact that it does not really leave the individual free. The only "free" thing is the aboriginal "spirit," pouring forth in its "durational" stream, and moulding bodies and brains as it goes along.

The philosophy of the complex vision does not believe in "spirit" or "life-force" or "durational streams of tendency." Starting with personality it is not incumbent upon it to show how personality has been evolved. It is no more incumbent upon it to show how personality has been evolved than it is incumbent upon pantheistic idealism to show how God or how the Absolute has been evolved. Personality with its implication of separate concrete psycho-material soul-monads is indeed our Absolute or at any rate is as much of an Absolute as we can ever get while we continue to recognize the independent existence of one universal space, of one universal ethereal medium, and of on universal objective mystery.

Perhaps the correct metaphysical statement of our philosophic position would be that our Absolute is a duality from the very start—a duality made up on one side of innumerable soul-monads and on the other side of an incomprehensible formless mass of plastic material, itself subdivided into the two aspects of a medium binding the soul-monads together, and an objective mystery into which they pierce their way.

When the evolutionists tell us that personality is a thing of late appearance in the system of things and a thing of which we are able to note the historic or prehistoric development, out of the "lower" forms of life, our answer is that we have no right to assume that the life of the earth and of the other planetary and stellar bodies is a "lower" form of life.

If to this the astronomer answer that he is able to carry the history of evolution further back than any planet or star, as far back as a vast floating mass of homogeneous fiery vapour, even then we should still maintain that this original nebular mass of fire was the material "body" of an integral soul-monad; and that in surrounding immensities of space there were other similar masses of nebular fire—possibly innumerable others—who in their turn were the bodily manifestations of integral soul-monads.

When evolutionists argue that personality is a late and accidental appearance on the world scene, they are only thinking of human personalities; and our contention is that while man has a right to interpret the universe in terms of his soul, he has no right to interpret the universe in terms of his body; and that it is therefore quite possible to maintain that the "body" of the earth has been from the beginning animated by a soul-monad whose life can in no sense be called "lower" than the life of the soul-monad which at present animates the human body. And in support of our contention just here we are able to quote not only the authority of Fechner but the authority of Professor James himself approving of Fechner.

What the philosophy of the complex vision really does is to take life just as it is—the ordinary multifarious spectacle presented to our senses and interpreted by our imagination—and regard this, and nothing more recondite than this, as the ultimate Absolute, or as near an Absolute as we are ever likely to get.

From our point of view it seems quite uncalled for to summon up vague and remote entities, like streams of consciousness and shootings forth of spirit, in order to interpret this immediate spectacle. Such streams of consciousness and shootings forth of spirit seem to us just as much abstractions and just as much conceptual substitutions for reality as do the old-fashioned metaphysical entities of "being" and "becoming."

No one has ever seen a life-stream or a life-force. No one has ever seen a compounded congeries of conscious states. But every one of us has seen a living human soul looking out of a living human body; and most of us have seen a living soul looking out of the mysterious countenance of earth, water, air and fire.

The philosophy of the soul-monad has at any rate this advantage over every other: namely, that it definitely represents human experience and can always be verified by human experience. Any human being can try the experiment of sinking into the depths of his own identity. Let the reader of this passage try such an experiment here and now; and let him, in the light of what he finds, decide this question. Does he find himself flowing mysteriously forth, along some indescribable "durational" stream, and, as he flows, feeling himself to be that stream? Or does he feel himself to be a definite concrete actual "I am I," "the guest and companion of his body" and, as far as the mortal weakness of flesh allows, the motive-principle of that body?

If the philosophy of the complex vision is able to make an appeal of this kind with a certain degree of assurance as to the answer, it is able to make a yet more convincing appeal, when—the soul's existence once admitted—it becomes a question as to that soul's inherent quality. No human being, unless in the grasp of some megalomania of virtue, can deny the existence, in the depths of his nature, of a struggle between the emotion of love and the emotion of malice.

Out of this ultimate duality under the pressure of the forms and shapes of life and the reaction against these of the imagination and the aesthetic sense, spring into existence those primordial ideas of truth and beauty and goodness which, are the very stuff and texture of our fate. But these ideas, primordial though they are, are so confused and distorted by their contact with circumstances and accident, that it may well be that no clear image of them is found in the recesses of the soul when the soul turns its glance inward.

No soul, however, can turn its glance inward without recognizing in its deepest being this ultimate struggle between love and malice. How then can any philosophy be regarded as a transcript and reflection of reality when at the very start it refuses to take cognizance of this fact? If the only knowledge, which is in any sense certain, is our knowledge of ourselves, and if our knowledge of ourselves implies our knowledge of a definite "soul-monad" for ever divided against itself in this abysmal struggle, how then may a philosophy be regarded as covering the facts of experience, when in place of this personal contradiction it predicates, as its explanation of the system of things, some remote, thin, abstract tendency, such as the "shooting forth of spirit" or the compounding of states of consciousness?

The whole matter may be thus summed up. The modern tendencies of thought which we have been considering, get rid of the old metaphysical notion of the logical Absolute only to substitute vague psychological "states of consciousness" in its place. But what philosophy requires if the facts of introspective experience are to be trusted is neither an Absolute in whose identity all difference is lost nor a stream of "states of consciousness" which is suspended, as it were, in a vacuum.

What philosophy requires is the recognition of real actual persons whose original revelation of the secret of life implies that abysmal duality of good and evil beyond the margin of which no living soul has ever passed. Whether or not this concrete "monad" or living substratum of personality survives the death of the body is quite a different question; is in fact a question to which the philosophy of the complex vision can make no definite response. In this matter all we can say is that those supreme moments of rhythmic ecstasy, whose musical equilibrium I have indicated in the expression "apex-thought," establish for us a conclusive certainty as to the eternal continuance, beyond the scope of all deaths, of that indestructible aspect of personality we have come to name the struggle between love and malice.

With the conclusive consciousness of this there necessarily arises a certain attitude of mind which is singularly difficult to describe but which I can hint at in the following manner. In the very act of recognition, in the act by which we apprehend the secret of the universe to consist in this abysmal struggle of the emotion of love with the emotion of malice, there is an implication of a complete acceptance of whatever the emotion of love or the principle of love is found to demand, as the terms of its relative victory over its antagonist. Whether this demand of love, or to put it more exactly this demand of "all souls" in whom love is dominant, actually issues in a personal survival after death we are not permitted to feel with any certainty. But what we feel with certainty, when the apex-thought of the complex vision reaches its consummation, is that we find our full personal self-realization and happiness in a complete acceptance of whatever the demand of love may be. And this is the case because the ultimate happiness and fulfilment of personality does not depend upon what may have happened to personality in the past or upon what may happen to personality in the future but solely and exclusively upon what personality demands here and now in the apprehension of the unassailable moment.

This suspension of judgment therefore in regard to the question of the immortality of the soul is a suspension of judgment implicit in the very nature of love itself. For if there were anything in the world nearer the secret of the world than is this duality of love and malice, then that alien thing, however we thought of it, would be the true object of the soul's desire and the victory of love over malice would fall into the second place.

If instead of the soul's desire being simply the victory of love over malice it were, so to speak, the "material fruit" of such a victory— namely, the survival of personality after death—then, in place of the struggle between love and malice, we should be compelled to regard personality in itself, apart from the nature of that personality, as the secret of the universe. But as we have repeatedly shown, it is impossible to think of any living personality apart from this abysmal dualism, the ebb and flow of which, with the relative victory of love over malice, is our ultimate definition of what living personality is. The emotion of love abstracted from personality is not the secret of the universe, because personality in its concrete living activity is the secret of the universe. It is this very abstraction of love, isolated from any person who loves, and projected as an abstract into the void, that has done so much to undermine religious thought, just as that other absolute of "pure being" has done so much to undermine philosophic thought.

Love and malice are unthinkable apart from personality; but personality divorced from the struggle between love and malice is something worse than unthinkable. It is something most tragically thinkable. It is in fact the plain reality of death. A dead body is a body in which the struggle between love and malice has completely ceased. A dead planet would be a planet in which the struggle between love and malice had ceased. We cannot speak of a "dead soul" because the soul is, according to our original definition, the very fusion-point and vortex-point where not only consciousness and energy meet but where love and malice meet and wage their eternal struggle.

Strictly speaking it is not true to say that the ultimate secret of the universe is the emotion of love. The emotion of love, just because it is an emotion, is the emotion of a personality. It is personality, not the emotion of love, which is the secret of the universe, which is, in fact, the very universe itself. But it is personality considered in its true concrete life, not as a mere abstraction devoid of all characteristics, which is this basic thing. And personality thus considered is, as we have seen, a living battleground of two ultimate emotions. The complete triumph of love over malice would mean the extinction of personality and following from this the extinction of the universe.

Thus what the soul's desire really amounts to, in those rhythmic moments when its diverse aspects are reduced to harmonious energy, is not the complete victory of love over malice but only a relative victory. What it really desires is that malice should still exist, but that it should exist in subordination to love.

The ideal of the soul therefore in its creative moments is the process of the overcoming of malice, not the completion of this process. In order to be perpetually overcome by love, malice must remain existent, must remain "still there." If it ceased to be there, there would be nothing left for love to overcome; and the ebb and flow of the universe, its eternal contradictions, would be at an end. The soul's desire, according to this view, is not a life after death where malice, shall we say, is completely overcome and "good" completely triumphant. The soul's desire is that malice, or evil, should continue to exist; but should continue to exist under the triumphant hand of love. The desire of the soul, in such ultimate moments, has nothing to do with the survival of the soul after death. It has to do with an acceptance of the demand of love. And what love demands is not that malice should disappear; but that it should for ever exist, in order that love should for ever be overcoming it. And the ecstasy of this process, of this "overcoming," is a thing of single moments, moments which, as they pass, not only reduce both past and future to an eternal "now" but annihilate everything else but this eternal "now." This annihilation of the past does not mean the extinction of memory or the extinction of hope. It only means that the profoundest of our memories are "brought over" as it were from the past into the present. It only means that a formless horizon of immense hope, indefinite and vague, hovers above the present, to give it spaciousness and freedom.

The revelation of the complex vision does not therefore answer the question of the immortality of the soul. What it does is to indicate the degree of importance of any answer to this question. And this degree of importance is much smaller than in our less harmonious moments we are inclined to suppose. At certain complacent moments the soul finds itself praying for some final assurance of personal survival. At certain other moments the soul is tempted to pray for complete annihilation. But at the moments when it is most entirely itself it neither prays for annihilation nor for immortality. It does not pray for itself at all. It prays that the will of the gods may be done. It prays that the power of love in every soul in the universe may hold the power of malice in subjection.

The soul therefore, revealed as a real substantial living thing by the complex vision, is not revealed as a thing necessarily exempt from death, but as a thing whose deepest activity renders it free from the fear of death.

In considering the nature of the contrast between the philosophy of the complex vision and the most dominant philosophic tendencies of the present time it is important to make clear what our attitude is towards that hypothetical assumption usually known as the Theory of Evolution.

If what is called Evolution means simply change, then we have not the least objection to the word. The universe obviously changes. It is undergoing a perpetual series of violent and revolutionary changes. But it does not necessarily improve or progress. On the contrary during enormous periods of time it deteriorates. Both progress and deterioration are of course purely human valuations. But according to our valuation of good and evil it may be said that during those epochs when the malicious, the predatory, the centripetal tendency in life predominates over the creative and centrifugal tendency, there is deterioration and degeneracy; and during the epochs when the latter overcomes the former there is growth and improvement.

It is quite obvious that from our point of view, there is no such thing as inanimate chemical substance, no such isolated evolutionary phases of "matter," such as the movements from "solids" to "liquids," from "liquids" to "gases," from "gases" to "ether," from "ether" to "electro-magnetism." All these apparent changes must be regarded as nothing less than the living organic changes taking place in the living bodies of actual personal souls.

According to our view the real and important variations in the multiform spectacle of the universe are the variations brought about by the perpetual struggle between life and death, in other words between the personal energy of creation and the personal resistance of malice.

For us the universe of bodies and souls is perpetually re-creating itself by the mysterious process of birth, perpetually destroying itself by the mysterious process of death.

It is this eternal struggle between the impulse to create new life and the impulse to resist the creation of life, and to destroy or to petrify life, which actually causes all movement in things and all change; movement sometimes forward and sometimes backward as the great pendulum and rhythm of existence swings one way or the other.

And even this generalization does not really cover what we regard as the facts of the case, because this backward or forward movement, though capable of being weighed and estimated "en masse" in the erratic and violent changes of history, is in reality a thing of particular and individual instances, a thing that ultimately affects nothing but individuals and personalities, in as much as it is the weighing and balancing of a struggle which takes place nowhere else except in the arena of concrete separate and personal souls.

What is usually called Evolution then, and what may just as reasonably be called Deterioration, is as far as we are concerned just a matter of perpetual movement and change.

The living personalities that fill the circle of space are perpetually reproducing themselves in a series of organic births, and perpetually passing away in the process of death.

We have also to remember that every living organism whether such an organism resemble that of a planet or a human being, is itself the dwelling-place of innumerable other living organisms dependent on it and drawing their life from it, precisely as their parent organism depends on, and draws its life from, the omnipresent universal ether.

What the philosophy of the complex vision denies and refutes is the modern tendency to escape from the real mystery of existence by the use of such vague hypothetical metaphors, all of them really profoundly anthropomorphic, such as "life-force" or "hyper-space" or "magnetic energy" or "streams of sub-consciousness."

The philosophy of the complex vision drives these pseudo-philosophers to the wall and compels them to confess that ultimately all they are aware of is the inner personal activity of their own individual souls; compels them to confess that when it comes to the final analysis their "life-force" and "pure thought" and "hyper-space" and "radio-magnetic activity" are all nothing but one-sided hypothetical abstractions taken from the concrete movements of concrete individual bodies and souls which by an inevitable act of the imagination we assume to reproduce in their interior reactions what we ourselves experience in ours.

To introduce such a conception as that of those mysterious super human beings, whom I have named "the gods," into a serious philosophic system, may well appear to many modern scientific minds the very height of absurdity.

But the whole method of the philosophy of the complex vision is based upon direct human experience; and from my point of view the obscure and problematic existence of some such beings has behind it the whole formidable weight of universal human feeling— a weight which is not made less valid by the arrogant use of mere phrases of rationalistic contempt such as that which is implied in the word "superstition."

From our point of view a philosophy which does not include and subsume and embody that universal human experience covered by the term "superstition" is a philosophy that has eliminated from its consideration one great slice of actual living fact. And it is in this aspect of the problem more than in any other that the philosophy of the complex vision represents a return to certain revelations of human truth—call them mythological if you please—which modern philosophy seems to have deliberately suppressed. In the final result it may well be that we have to choose, as our clue to the mystery of life, either "mathematica" or "mythology."

The philosophy of the complex vision is compelled by the very nature of its organ of research to choose, in this dilemma, the latter rather than the former. And the universe which it thus dares to predicate is at least a universe that lends itself, as so many "scientific" universes do not, to that synthetic activity of the imaginative reason which in the long run alone satisfies the soul. And such a universe satisfies the soul, as these others cannot, because it reflects, in its objective spectacle of things, the profoundest interior consciousness of the actual living self which the soul in its deepest moments of introspection is able to grasp.

Modern science, under the rhetorical spell of this talismanic word "evolution," seems to imply that it can explain the multiform shapes and appearances of organic life by deducing them, in all their vivid heterogeneity, from some hypothetical monistic substance which it boldly endows with the mysterious energy called the "life-force" and which it then permits to project out of itself, by some sort of automatic volition, the whole long historic procession of living organisms.

This purely imaginative assumption gives it, in the popular mind, a sort of vague right to make the astounding claim that it has "explained" the origin of things. Little further arrogance is needed to give it, in the popular mind, the still more astounding right to claim that it has indicated not only the nature of the "beginning" of things but the nature of their "end" also; this "end" being nothing less than some purely hypothetical "equilibrium" when the movement of "advance," coming full circle, rounds itself off into the movement of "reversion."

The philosophy of the complex vision makes no claim to deal either with the beginning of things or with the end of things. It recognizes that "beginnings" and "ends" are not things with which we can intelligibly deal; are, on the contrary, things which are completely unthinkable.

What we actually see, feel, divine, imagine, love, hate, detest, desire, dream, create and destroy—these living, dying, struggling, relaxing, advancing and retreating things—this space, this ether, these stars and suns, these animals, fishes, birds, plants, this earth and moon, these men and these trees and flowers, these high and unchanging eternal ideas of the beautiful and the good, these transitory perishing mortal lives and these dimly discerned immortal figures that we name "gods," all these, as far as we are concerned, have for ever existed, all these, as far as we are concerned, must for ever exist.

In the immense procession of deaths and births, it is indeed certain that the soul and body of the Earth have given birth to all the souls and bodies which struggle for existence upon her living flesh and draw so much of their love and their malice from the unfathomable depths of her spirit. But when once we accept as our basic axiom that where the "soul-monad" exists, whether such a "monad" be human, sub-human, or super-human, it exists in actual concrete organic personal integrity, we are saved from the necessity of explaining how, and by what particular series of births and deaths and change and variation, the living spectacle of things, as we visualize it today, has "evolved" or has "deteriorated" out of the remote past.

It is in fact by their constant preoccupation with the immediate and material causes of such organic changes, that men of science have been distracted from the real mystery. This real mystery does not limit itself to the comparatively unimportant "How," but is constantly calling upon us to deal with the terrible and essential questions, the two grim interrogations of the old Sphinx, the "What" and the "Wherefore."

It is by its power to deal with these more essential riddles that any philosophy must be weighed and judged; and it is just because what we name Science stops helplessly at this unimportant "How," that it can never be said to have answered Life's uttermost challenge.

Materialistic and Evolutionary Hypotheses must always, however far they may go in reducing so-called "matter" to so-called "spirit," remain outside the real problem. No attenuation of "matter" into movement or energy or magnetic radio-activity can reach the impregnable citadel of life. For the citadel of life is to be found in nothing less than the complex of personality—whether such personality be that of a planet or a plant or an animal or a man or a god—must always be recognized as inherent in an actual living soul-monad, divided against itself in the everlasting duality.

Although the most formidable support to our theory of an "eternal vision," wherein all the living entities that fill space under the vibration of an unspeakable cosmic rhythm and brought into focus by one supreme act of contemplative "love," is drawn from the rare creative moments of what I have called the "apex-thought," it still remains that for the normal man in his most normal hours the purely scientific view is completely unsatisfying.

I do not mean that it is unsatisfying because, with its mechanical determinism, it does not satisfy his desires. I mean that it does not satisfy his imagination, his instinct, his intuition, his emotion, his aesthetic sense; and in being unable to satisfy these, it proves itself, "ipso-facto," false and equivocal.

It is equally true that, except for certain rare and privileged natures, the orthodox systems of religion are equally unsatisfying.

What is required is some philosophic system which is bold enough to include the element of so-called "superstition" and at the same time contradicts neither reason nor the aesthetic sense.

Such a system, we contend, is supplied by the philosophy of the complex vision; a philosophy which, while remaining frankly anthropomorphic and mythological, does not, in any narrow or impudent or complacent manner, slur over the bitter ironies of this cruel world, or love the clear outlines of all drastic issues in a vague, unintelligible, unaesthetic idealism.

What our philosophy insists upon is that the modern tendency to reduce everything to some single monistic "substance," which, by the blind process of "evolution," becomes all this passionate drama that we see, is a tendency utterly false and misleading. For us the universe is a much larger, freer, stranger, deeper, more complicated affair than that.

For us the universe contains possibilities of real ghastly, incredible evil, descending into spiritual depths, before which the normal mind may well shudder and turn dismayed away.

For us the universe contains possibilities of divine, magical, miraculous good, ascending into spiritual heights and associating itself with immortal super-human beings, before which the mind of the merely logical intelligence may well pause, baffled, puzzled, and obscurely indignant.

The "fulcrum" upon which the whole issue depends, the "pivot" upon which it turns, is the existence of actual living souls filling the immense spaces of nature.

If there is no "soul" in any living thing, then our whole system crumbles to pieces. If there are living "souls" in every living thing, then the universe, as revealed by the complex vision, is more real than the universe as revealed by the chief exponents of modern thought.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

The philosophy of the complex vision inevitably issues, when it is applied to political and economic conditions, in the idea of communism. The idea of communism is inherent in it from the beginning; and in communism, and in communism alone, does it find its objective and external expression.

The philosophy of the complex vision reveals, as we have seen, a certain kind of ultimate duality as the secret of life. This ultimate duality remains eternally unreconciled; for it is a duality within the circle of every personal soul; and the fact that every personal soul is surrounded by an incomprehensible substance under the dominion of time and space, does not reconcile these eternal antagonists; because these eternal antagonists are for ever unfathomable, even as the personal soul, of which they are the conflicting conditions, is itself for ever unfathomable.

It is therefore a perpetual witness to the truth that the idea of communism is the inevitable expression of the complex vision that this idea should, more than other idea in the world, divide the souls of men into opposite camps. If the idea of communism were not the inevitable expression of the philosophy of the complex vision as applied to human life it would be an idea with regard to which all human souls would hold infinitely various opinions.

But this is not the case. In regard to the idea of communism we do not find this infinite variety of opinion. We find, on the contrary, a definite and irreconcilable duality of thought. Human souls are divided on this matter not, as they are on other matters, into a motley variety of convictions but into two opposite and irreconcilable convictions, unfathomably hostile to one another.

There is no other question, no other issue, about which the souls of men are divided so clearly and definitely into two opposite camps. The question of the existence of a "parent of the universe" does not divide them so clearly; because it always remains possible for any unbeliever in a spiritual unity of this absolute kind to use the term "parent," if he pleases, for that incomprehensible "substance" under the dominion of space and time which takes the triple form of the "substance" out of which the substratum of the soul is made, the "substance" out of which the "objective mystery" is made, and the substance out of which is made the surrounding "medium" which holds all personal souls together.

The question of the mortality or the immortality of the soul does not divide them so clearly; because such a question is entirely insoluble; and a vivid consciousness of its insolubility accompanies all argument. The question of race does not divide them so clearly; because both with regard to race and with regard to class the division is very largely a superficial thing, dependent upon public opinion and upon group-consciousness and leaving many individuals on each side entirely unaffected.

The question of sex does not divide them so clearly; because there are always innumerable examples of noble and ignoble treachery to the sex-instinct; not to speak of a certain intellectual neutrality which refuses to be biased. The idea of communism is on the contrary so profoundly associated with the original revelation of the complex vision that it must be regarded as the inevitable expression of all the attributes of this vision when such attributes are reduced to a rhythmic harmony.

That this is no speculative hypothesis but a real fact of experience can be proved by any sincere act of personal introspection.

The philosophy of the complex vision is based upon those rare and supreme moments when the soul's "apex-thought" quivers like an arrow in the very heart of the surrounding darkness. By any honest act of introspection we can recall to memory the world-deep revelations which are thus obtained. And among these revelations the one most vivid and irrefutable, as far as human association is concerned, is the revelation of the idea of communism.

So vivid and so dominant is this idea, that it may be said that no motive which drives or obsesses the will in the sphere of external relations can approach or rival it in importance. And that this is so can be proved by the fact that the opposite of this idea, namely the idea of private property, is found when we analyse the content of our profoundest instincts to be in perpetual conflict with the idea of communism.

And the inevitableness of the world-deep struggle between these two ideas is proved by the fact that in no other way, as soon as the objective world is introduced at all, can we conceive of love and malice as expressing themselves. Love must naturally express itself in the desire to "have all things in common"; and malice must naturally express itself in the desire to have as little as possible in common and as much as possible for ourselves alone.