I say "the opposite of love" deliberately; because I am anxious to indicate, in regard to emotion, how difficult it is to find adequate words to cover the actual field of what we feel.

I should like to write even the word "love" with some such mark of hesitation. For, just because of the appalling importance of this ultimate duality, it is essential to be on our guard against the use of words which convey a narrow, crude, rough-and-ready, and superficial meaning. By the emotion of "love" I do not mean the amorous phenomenon which we call "being in love." Nor do I mean the calmer emotion which we call "affection." The passion of friendship, when friendship really becomes a passion, is nearer my meaning than any of these. And yet the emotion of love, conceived as one side of this eternal duality, is much more than the "passion of friendship"; because it is an emotion that can be felt in the presence of things and ideas as well as persons. Perhaps the emotion of love as symbolized in the figure of Christ, combined with the aesthetic and intellectual passion inherited from the Greek philosophers, comes nearest to what I have in mind; though even this, without some tangible and concrete embodiment, tends to escape us and evade analysis.

And if it is hard to define this "love" which is the protagonist, so to speak, in the world's emotional drama, it is still harder to define its opposite, its antagonist. I could name this by the name of "hate," the ordinary antithesis of love, but if I did so it would have to be with a very wide connotation.

The true opposite to the sort of "love" I have in my mind is not so much "hate" as a kind of dull and insensitive hostility, a kind of brutal malignity and callous aversion. Perhaps what we are looking for as the true opposite of love may be best defined as malice.

Malice seems to convey a more impersonal depth and a wider reach of activity than the word hate and has also a clearer suggestion of deliberate insensitiveness about it. The most concentrated and energetic opposite of love is not either hate or malice. It is cruelty; which is a thing that seems to draw its evil inspiration from the profoundest depths of conscious existence.

But cruelty must necessarily have for its "object" something living and sentient. A spiritual feeling, a work of art, an idea, a principle, a landscape, a theory, an inanimate group of things, could not be contemplated with an emotion of cruelty, though it could certainly be contemplated with an emotion of malice.

There is often, if not always, a strange admixture of sensuality in cruelty. Cruelty, profoundly evil as it is, has a living intensity which makes it less dull, less thick, less deliberately insensitive, less coldly hostile, than the pure emotion of malice, and therefore less adapted than malice to be regarded as the true opposite of love.

But the best indication of the distinction I want to make will be found in the contrast between the conceptions of creation and destruction. The dull, thick, insensitive callousness which we are conscious of in the opposite of love is an indication that while love is essentially creative the opposite of love is essentially that which resists creation.

The opposite of love is not destructive in the sense of being an active destructive force. Such an active destructive force must necessarily, by reason of the passionate energy in it, be a perversion of creative power, not the opposite of creative power.

Creative power, even in its unperverted activity, must always be capable of destroying. It must be capable of destroying what is in the way of further creation. Thus the true opposite of creation is not destruction, but the inert, heavy, thick, callous, brutal, insensitive "obscurantism" or "material opacity" which resists the pressure of the creative spirit.

By this analysis of the ultimate duality of emotion we are put in possession of a basic aspect of the complex vision, which must largely shape and determine its total activity. The soul within us, that mysterious "something" which is the living and concrete "person" whose vision the complex vision is, is a thing subject at the start to this unfathomable duality, the emotion of love and the emotion of malice.

The emotion of love is the life-begetting, life-conceiving force, the creator of beauty, the discoverer of truth, and the reconciler of eternal contradictions.

The emotion of malice, with its frozen sneer of sardonic denial, raises its "infernal fist" against the centrifugal outflowing of the emotion of love. It is impossible to conceive of self-consciousness without love and hatred; or, as I prefer to say, without love and malice. Self-consciousness implies from the start what we call the universe; and the universe cannot appear upon the scene without exciting in us the emotion of love and hate. Every man born into the world loves and hates directly he is conscious of the world. This is the ultimate duality. Attraction and repulsion is the material formula for this contradiction.

If everything in the world were illusion except one Universal Being, such a being must necessarily be thought of as experiencing the emotion of self-love and of self-hatred. A condition of absolute indifference is unthinkable. Such indifference could not last a moment without becoming either that faint hatred, which we call "boredom," or that faint love, which we call "interest." The contemplation of the universe with no emotional reaction of any kind is an inconceivable thing. An infant at its mother's breast displays love and malice. At one and the same moment it satisfies its thirst and beats upon the breast that feeds it.

The primordial process of philosophizing and the primal will to philosophize are both of them penetrated through and through, with this ultimate duality of love and malice. Love and malice in alternate impulse are found latent and potent in every philosophic effort. Behind every philosophy, if we have the love or the malice to seek for it, may be found the love or malice, or both of them, side by side, of the individual philosopher. That pure and unemotional desire for truth for its own sake which is the privilege of physical science cannot retain its simplicity when confronted with the deeper problems of philosophy. It cannot do so because the complex vision with which we philosophize contains emotion as one of its basic attributes.

To consider next, the attribute of imagination. Imagination seems, when we analyse it, to resolve itself into the half-creative, half-interpretative act by which the complex personality seizes upon, plunges into, and moulds to its purpose, that deeper unity in any group of things which gives such a group its larger and more penetrating significance.

Imagination differs from intuition in the fact that by its creative and interpretative power it dominates, possesses and moulds the material it works upon. Intuition is entirely receptive and it receives the illumination offered to it at one single indrawing, at one breath. Imagination may be regarded as a male attribute; intuition as a feminine one; although in a thousand individual cases the situation is actually reversed.

To realize the primary importance of imagination one has only to visualize reason, will, taste, sensation, and so forth, energizing in its absence. One becomes aware at once that such a limited activity does not cover the field of man's complex vision. Something—a power that creates, interprets, illumines, gathers up into large and flowing outlines—is absent from such an experience.

Consider, in the next place, that primordial attribute of the complex vision which we commonly name conscience. We are not concerned here with the world-old discussion as to the "origin" of conscience. Conscience, from the point of view we are now considering, is just as fundamental and axiomatic as will, or intuition, or sensation.

The philosophy of the complex vision retains, with regard to what is called "evolution," a completely suspended judgment. The process of historic evolution may or may not have resulted in the particular differentiation of species which we now behold. What we are now assuming is that, in whatever way the differentiation of actual living organisms has come about, every particular living organism, including the planetary and stellar bodies, must possess in some degree or other the organ of apprehension which we call the complex vision.

Our assumption, in fact, is that every living thing has personality; that personality implies the existence of a definite soul-monad; that where such a soul-monad exists there is a complex vision; and finally that, where there is a complex vision, there must be, in some rudimentary or embryotic state, the eleven attributes of such a vision, including the attribute which the human race has come to call "conscience" and which is, in reality, "the power of response" to the vision which we have named "immortal." When evolutionists retort to us that what we call personality is only a late and accidental phenomenon in the long process of evolution, our answer is that when they seek, according to such an assumption, to visualize the universe as it was before personality appeared, they really, only in a surreptitious and illegitimate manner, project their own conscious personality into "the vast backward and abysm of time," to be the invisible witness of this pre-personal universe.

Thus when evolutionists assure us that there was once a period in the history of the stellar system when nothing existed but masses of gaseous nebulae, our reply is that they have forgotten that invisible and shadowy projection of their own personality which is the pre-supposed watcher or witness of this "nothing-but-nebulae" state of things.

The doctrine or hypothesis of evolution does not in any degree explain the mystery of the universe. All it does is to offer us an hypothetical picture—true or false—of the manner in which the changes of organic and inorganic life succeeded one another in their historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere, just as "personalists" have; and it is much more difficult for them to show how masses of utterly unconscious "nebulae" evoked the mystery of personality than it is for us to show how the primordial existence of personality demands at the very start some sort of material or bodily expression, whether of a nebular or of any other kind.

Evolutionists, forgetting the presence of that invisible "watcher" of their evolutionary process which they have themselves projected into the remote planetary past, assume as their axiomatic "data" that soulless unconscious chemical elements possess "within them" the miraculous power of producing living personalities. All one has to do is to pile up thousands upon thousands of years in which the miracle takes place.

But the philosophy of the complex vision would indicate that no amount of piling up of centuries upon centuries could possibly produce out of "unconscious matter" the perilous and curious "stuff" which we call "consciousness of life." And we would further reply to the evolutionists that their initial assumption as to the objective existence, suspended in a vacuum, of masses of material chemistry is an assumption which has been abstracted and isolated from the total volume of those sense-impressions, which are the only actual reality we know, and which are the impressions made, in human experience, upon some living personality.

This criticism of the evolutionists' inevitable attack upon us enters naturally at this point; because, while the average mind is willing enough to grant some sort of vague omnipresent "will to evolve" to the primordial "nebula" and even prepared to allow it such obscure consciousness as is implied in the phrase "life-force" or "elan vital," it is startled and shocked to a supreme degree when we assert that such "nebula," if it existed, was the outward body or form of a living "soul-monad" possessed, even as human beings are, of every attribute of the complex vision.

The average mind, in its vague and careless mood, is ready to accept our contention that some sort of will or reason or consciousness existed at the beginning of things. It is only when such a mind comes to realize that what we are predicating is actual personality, with all the implications of that, that it cries out in protest. The average mind can swallow our contention that reason and will existed from the beginning because the average mind has been penetrated for centuries by vague traditions of an "over-soul" or an universal "reason" or "will." It is only when in our analysis of the attributes of personality we come bolt up against the especially anthropomorphic attribute of "conscience" that it staggers and gasps.

For the original "stellar gas" to be vaguely animated by some obscure "elan vital" seemed natural enough; but for it to be the "body" of some definite living soul seems almost humorous; and for such a living soul to possess the attribute of "conscience," or the power of response to the vision of immortals, seems not only humorous but positively absurd.

The philosophy of the complex vision, however, in its analysis of the eternal elements of personality is not in the least afraid of reaching conclusions which appear "absurd" to the average intelligence. The philosophy of the complex vision accepts the element of the "absurd" or of the "outrageous" or of the "fantastic" in its primordial assumptions; for according to its contention this element of the "apparently impossible" is an essential ingredient in the whole system of things.

Life, according to this philosophy, is only one aspect of personality. Another aspect of personality is the apparently miraculous creation of "something" out of "nothing"; for the unfathomable creative power of personality extends beyond and below all the organic phenomena which we group vaguely together under the name of "life."

Thus when in our analysis of the attributes of the complex vision we are confronted by the evolutionary question as to how such a thing, as the thing we call "conscience," got itself lodged in the little cells of the human cranium, our answer is that the question stated in this manner does not touch the essential problem at all. The essential problem from the point of view of the philosophy of the complex vision is not how "conscience," or why other attribute of the soul, got itself lodged in the human skull, or expressed, shall we say, through the human skull, but how it is that the whole stream of sense-impressions, of which the hardness and thickness of the human skull is only one impression among many, and the original "star-dust" or "star-nebulae" only another impression among many, ever got itself unified and synthesized into the form of "impression" at all.

In other words the problem is not how the attributes of the soul arose from the chemistry of the brain and the nerves; but how the brain and the nerves together with the whole stream of material phenomena from the star-dust upwards, ever got themselves unified and focussed into any sort of intelligibility or system. The average human mind which feels a shock of distrust and suspicion directly we suggest that the thing we name "conscience," defined as the power of response to the ideal vision, is an inalienable aspect of what we call "the soul" wherever the soul exists, feels no sort of shock or surprise when we appeal to its own "conscience," or when it appeals to the "conscience" of its child or its dog or even of its cat, or when it displays anger with its trees or its flowers for their apparent wilfulness and errancy.

Kant found in the moral sense of humanity his door of escape from the fatal relativity of pure reason with its confounding antinomies. Huxley found in the moral sense of humanity a mysterious, unrelated phenomenon that refused to fall into line with the rest of the evolutionary-stream. But when, in one hold act of faith or of imagination, we project the content of our own individual soul into the circle of every other possible "soul," including the "souls" of such phenomenal vortices of matter as those from which historic evolution takes its start, this impossible gulf or "lacuna" dividing the human scene from all previous "scenes" is immediately bridged; and the whole stream of material sense-impression flows forward, in parallel and consonant congruity, with the underlying creative energy of all the complex visions of which it is the expression.

Therefore, there is no need for us, in our consideration of the basic attribute of the soul which we call conscience, to tease ourselves with the fabulous image of some prehistoric "cave-man" supposedly devoid of such a sense. To do this is to employ a trick of the isolated reason quite alien from our real human imagination.

Our own personality is so constructed that it is impossible for us to realize with any sort of intelligent sympathy what the feelings of this conscience-less cave-man would be. To contemplate his existence at all we have to resort to pure rationalistic speculation. We have to leave our actual human experience completely behind. But the philosophy of the complex vision is an attempt to interpret the mystery of the universe in terms of nothing else than actual human experience. So we are not only permitted but compelled to put out of court this conscience-less cave-man of pure speculation. It is true that we encounter certain eccentric human beings who deny that they possess this "moral sense"; but one has only to observe them for a little while under the pressure of actual life to find out how they deceive themselves.

Experience certainly indicates that every human being, however normal and "good," has somewhere in him a touch of insanity and a vein of anti-social aberration. But no human being, however abnormal or however "criminal," is born into the world without this invisible monitor we call "conscience."

The curious pathological experience which might be called "conscience-killing" is certainly not uncommon. But it is an experiment that has never been more than approximately successful. In precisely the same way we might practise "reason-killing" or "intuition-killing" or "taste-killing." One may set out to hunt and try to kill any basic attribute of our complex vision; but the proof of the truth of our whole argument lies in the fact that these murderous campaigns are never completely successful. The "murdered" attribute refuses to remain quiet in its grave. It stretches out an arm from beneath the earth. It shakes the dust off and comes to life again.

When we leave the question as to the existence of conscience, and enquire what the precise and particular "command" of conscience may be in any individual case, we approach the edge of an altogether different problem.

The particular message or command of conscience is bound to differ in a thousand ways in the cases of different personalities. Only in its ultimate essence it cannot differ. Because, in its ultimate essence, the conscience of every individual is confronted by that eternal duality of love and malice which is the universal contradiction at the basis of every living soul.

But short of this there is room for an infinite variety of "categorical imperatives." The conscience of one personality is able to accept as its "good" the very same thing that another personality is compelled to regard as its "evil." Indeed it is conceivable that a moment might arise in the history of the race when one single solitary individual called that thing "good" or that thing "evil" which all the rest of the world regarded in the opposite sense. Not only so; but it might even happen that the genius and persuasiveness of such a person might change into its direct opposite the moral valuation of the whole of humanity. In many quite ordinary cases there may arise a clash between the conventional morality of the community and the verdict of an individual conscience. In such cases it would be towards what the community termed "immoral" that the conscience of the individual would point, and from the thing that the community termed "moral" that it would turn instinctively away.

A conscience of this kind would suffer the pain of remorse when in its weakness it let itself be swayed by the "community-morality" and it would experience the pleasure of relief when in absolute loneliness it defied the verdict of society.

Let us consider now an attribute of man's complex vision which must instantaneously be accepted as basic and fundamental by every living person. I refer to what we call "sensation." The impressions of the outward senses may be criticized. They may be corrected, modified, reduced to order, and supplemented by other considerations. Conclusions based upon them may be questioned. But whatever be done with them, or made by them, they must always remain an integral and inveterate aspect of man's personality.

The sensations of pain and pleasure—who can deny the primordial and inescapable character of these? Not that the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain can be the unbroken motive-force even of the most hedonistic among us. Our complex vision frequently flings us passionately upon pain. We often embrace pain in an ecstasy of welcome. Nor is this fierce embracing of pain "motivated" by a deliberate desire to get pleasure out of pain. It seems in some strange way due to an attraction towards pain for its own sake— towards pain, as though pain were really beautiful and desirable in itself. One element in all this is undoubtedly due to the desire of the will to assert its freedom and the integrity of its being; in other words to the desire of the will towards the irrational, the capricious, the destructive, the chaotic.

It has been only the least imaginative of philosophers who have taken for granted that man invariably desires his own welfare. Man does not even invariably desire his own pleasure. He desires the reactive vibration of power; and very often this "power" is the power to rush blindly upon destruction. But, whether dominant or not as a motive affecting the will, it remains that our experience of pleasure and pain is a basic experience of the complex vision. And this experience of sensation is not only a passive experience. The attribute of sensation has its active, its energetic, its creative side. No one who has suffered extreme pain or enjoyed exquisite and thrilling pleasures, can deny the curious fact that these things take to themselves a kind of independent life within us and become something very like "entities" or living separate objects.

This phenomenon is due to the fact that our whole personality incarnates itself in the pain or in the pleasure of the moment. Such pain, such pleasure, is the quintessential attenuated "matter" with which our soul clothes itself. At such moments we are the pain; we are the pleasure. Our human identity seems merged, lost, annihilated. Our soul seems no longer our soul. It becomes the soul of the overpowering sensation. We ourselves at such moments become fiery molecules of pain, burning atoms of pleasure. Just as the logical reason can abstract itself from the other primal energies and perform strange and fantastic tricks, so the activity of sensation can so absorb, obsess and overpower the whole personality that the rhythm of existence is entirely broken.

Pain at the point of ecstasy, pleasure at the point of ecstasy, are both of them destructive of those rare moments when our complex vision resolves itself into music. Such music is indeed itself a kind of ecstasy; but it is an ecstasy intellectualized and consciously creative. Pain is present there and pleasure is present there; but they are there only as orchestral notes in a larger unity that has absorbed them and transmuted them.

When a work of art by reason of its sensational appeal reduces us to an ecstasy of pleasure or pain it renders impossible that supreme act of the complex vision by means of which the immortal calm of the ideal vision descends upon the unfathomable universe.

Sensation carried to its extreme limit becomes impersonal; for in its unconscious mechanism personality is devoured. But it does not become impersonal in that magical liberating sense in which the impersonal is an escape, bringing with it a feeling of large, cool, quiet, and unruffled space. It becomes impersonal in a thick, gross, opaque, mechanical manner.

There is brutality and outrage; there is bestiality and obscenity about both pain and pleasure when in their voracious maw they devour the magic of the unfathomable world. Thus it may be noted that most great and heroic souls hold their supreme pain at a distance from them, with a proud gesture of contempt, and go down at the last with their complex vision unruffled and unimpaired. There is indeed a still deeper "final moment" than this; but it is so rare as to be out of the reach of average humanity. I refer to an attitude like that of Jesus upon the cross; in whose mood towards his own suffering there was no element of "pride of will" but only an immense pity for the terrible sensitiveness of all life, and a supreme heightening of the emotion of love towards all life.

It will be noted that in my analysis of "sensation" I have said nothing of what are usually called "the five senses." These senses are obviously the material "feelers" or the gates of material sentiency by which the soul's attribute of sensation feeds itself from the objective world; but they are so penetrated and percolated, through and through, by the other basic activities of the soul, that it is extremely difficult to disentangle from our impressions of sight, of sound, of touch, of taste, and of smell, those interwoven threads of reason, imagination and so forth which so profoundly modify and transmute, even in the art of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, the various manifestations of "the objective mystery" which we apprehend in our sensuous grasp.

By emphasizing the feelings of pleasure and pain as the primary characteristics of the attribute of sensation we are indicating the fact that every sensation we experience carries with it in some perceptible degree or other, the feeling of "well-being" or the feeling of distress.

We now come to consider that dim, obscure, but nevertheless powerful energy, which the universal tradition of language dignifies by the name of "instinct." This "instinct" is the portion of the activity of the soul which works more blindly and less consciously than any other.

The French philosopher Bergson isolates and emphasizes this subterranean activity until it seems to him to hold in its grasp a deeper secret of life than any other energy which man possesses To secure for instinct this primary place in the panorama of life it is necessary to eliminate from the situation that silent witness which we call "the mind" or self-consciousness; that witness which from its invisible watch-tower looks forth upon the whole spectacle. It is necessary to take for granted the long historic stream of evolutionary development. It is necessary to regard this development in its organic totality as the sole reality with which we have to deal.

The invisible mental witness being eliminated, it becomes necessary, if instinct is to be thus made supreme, to regard the appearance of the soul as a mere stage in an evolutionary process, the driving-force of which is the power of instinct itself. Planets and plants, men and animals, are seen in this way to be all dominated by instinct; and instinct is found to be so much the most important element in evolution, that upon it, rather than upon anything else, the whole future of the universe may be said to depend.

Having made this initial plunge into shameless objectivity, having put completely out of court the invisible witness of it all, we find ourselves reduced to regarding this "blind" instinct as the galvanic battery which moves the world. Thus isolated from the other powers of the soul, this mysterious energy, this subterranean driving-force, has to bear the whole weight of everything that happens in space and time. A strange sort of "blindness" must its blindness be, when its devices can supply the place of the most passionate intellectual struggles of the mind!

If it is blind, it gropes its way, in its blindness, through the uttermost gulfs of space and into the nethermost abysses of life. If it is dumb, its silence is the irresistible silence of Fate, the silence of the eternal "Mothers."

But the "instinct" which is one of the basic attributes of the complex vision is not quite such an awe-inspiring thing as this. To raise it into such a position as this there has to be a vigorous suppression, as I have hinted, of many other attributes of the soul. Instinct may be defined as the pressure of obscure creative desire, drawn from the inscrutable recesses of the soul, malleable up to a certain point by reason and will, but beyond that point remaining unconscious, irrational, incalculable, elusive. That it plays an enormous part in the process of life cannot be denied; but the part it plays is not so isolated from consciousness as sometimes has been imagined.

There is in truth a strange reciprocity between instinct and self-consciousness, according to which they both play into each other's hands. This is above all true of great artists' work, which in a superficial sense might be called unconscious, but which in a deeper sense is profoundly conscious. It seems as though, in great works of art, a certain superficial reasoning is sacrificed to instinct, but in that very sacrifice a deeper level of reason is reached between which and instinct there is no longer anything but complete understanding.

To intellectualize instinct is one of the profoundest secrets of the art of life; and it is only when instinct is thus intellectualized, or brought into focus with the other aspects of the soul, that it is able to play its proper rhythmic part in the musical synthesis of the complex vision. But although we cannot allow to instinct the all-absorbing part in the world-play which Bergson claims for it, it remains that we have to regard it as one of the most mysterious and incalculable of the energies of the soul. It is instinct which brings all living entities into relation with something sub-conscious in their own nature.

Under the pressure of instinct man recognizes the animal in himself, the plant in himself, and even a strange affinity with the inorganic and the inanimate. It is instinct in us which attracts us so strangely to the earth under our feet. It is instinct which attracts certain individual souls to certain particular natural elements, such as air, fire, sand, mould, rain, wind, water, and the like; a kind of remote atavistic reciprocity in us stretching out towards that particular element. It is by means of instinct that we are able to sink into that mysterious sub-conscious world which underlies the conscious levels of every soul-monad. Under the groping and fumbling guidance of this strange power we seem to come into touch with the profoundest reservoirs of our personal identity.

Considering what fantastic and cruel tricks the lonely thinking power, the abstract reason, has been allowed to play us it is no wonder that this French philosopher has been tempted to turn away from reason and find in instinct the ultimate solution. Instinct, as we give ourselves up to it, seems to carry us into the very nerves and tissues and veins and pulses of life. Its verdicts seem to reach us with an absolute and unquestionable authority. They seem to bear upon them an "imprimatur" more powerful than any moral sanction. Potent and terrible, direct and final, instinct seems to rise up out of the depths and break every law.

It leaps forth from our inmost being like a second self more powerful than we are. It invades religion. It incarnates itself in lust. It obsesses taste. It masquerades as intuition. It triumphs over reason. With an irrationality, that seems at the same time terrible and beautiful, instinct moves straight to its goal. It follows its purpose with demonic tenacity, heedless of logic, contemptuous of consequences. It cares nothing for contradictions. It forces contradictions to lose themselves in one another according to some secret law of its own, unknown to the law of reason.

Such, then, is instinct, the sub-conscious fatality of Nature so difficult to control; whose unrestrained activity is capable of completely destroying the rhythm of the complex vision. Nothing but the power of the apex-thought of man's whole concentrated being is able to dominate this thing. It may be detected lurking in the droop of the Sphinx's eyelids and in the cruel smile upon her mouth. But the answer given to the challenge of this subterranean force is not, after all, any logical judgment of the pure reason. It is the answer of the vision of the artist, holding its treacherous material under his creative hand.

Let us turn now to the attribute of "intuition." Intuition is a thing more clearly definable and more easily analysed than almost any other of the aspects of the soul. Intuition is the feminine counterpart of imagination; and, as compared with instinct, it is a power which acts in clearly denned, isolated, intermittent movements, each one of which has a definite beginning and a definite end. As compared with imagination, intuition is passive and receptive; as compared with instinct it does not fumble and grope forward, steadily and tenaciously, among the roots of things; but it suspends itself, mirror-like, upon the surface of the unfathomable waters, and suspended there reflects in swift sudden glimpses the mysterious movements of the great deep. In this process of reflecting, or apprehending in sudden, intermittent glimpses, the mysterious depths of the life of the soul, intuition is less affected by the reason or by the will than any other aspect of the complex vision.

Instinct, in secret sub-conscious alliance with the will, is a permanent automatic energy, working in the hidden darkness of the roots of things like an ever-flowing subterranean stream. The revelations of intuition, on the other hand, are not flowing and constant, but separate, isolated, distinct and detached. In the subject-matter of their revelations, too, intuition and instinct are very different. If the recesses of the soul be compared to a fortified castle, instinct is the active messenger of the place, continually issuing forth on secret errands concerning the real nature of which he is himself often quite ignorant. Intuition, on the contrary, is the little postern gate at the back of the building, set open at rare moments to the wide fields and magical forests which extend to the far-off horizon.

Instinct is always found in close contact with sensation, groping its ways through the midst of the mass of material impressions, acting and reacting as it fumbles among such impressions. Intuition seems to deal directly and absolutely with a clear and definite landscape behind the superficial landscape, with a truth behind truth, with a reality within reality.

To take an instance from common experience: a stranger, an unknown person, enters our circle. Instinct, working automatically and sensationally, may attract us powerfully towards such a person, with a steady, irresistible attraction. Intuition, on the contrary, uttering its revelation abruptly and with, so to speak, one sudden mysterious cry, may warn us of some dangerous quicksand or perilous jungle in such a stranger's nature of which instinct was totally ignorant because the thing was what might be called a "spiritual quality" lying deeper than those sensational or magnetic levels through which instinct feels its way.

The instinct of animals or birds for instance warns them very quickly with regard to the presence of some natural enemy whose approach they apprehend through some mysterious sense-impression beyond the analysis of human reason. But when their enemy is the mental intention of a human being they are only too easily tricked.

To take quite a different instance. It may easily happen that while conscience has habitually driven us to a certain course of action against which instinct has never revolted because of its preoccupation with the senses, some sudden flash of intuition reaching us from the hidden substratum of our being changes our whole perspective and gives to conscience itself a completely opposite bias. What these intermittent revelations of intuition certainly do achieve is the preservation in the soul's memory of the clear and deep and free and unfathomable margins of the ultimate mystery, those wavering sea-edges and twilight-shores of our being, which the austere categories of rational logic tend to shut out as if by impenetrable walls.

It remains to consider the attribute of memory. Memory is the name which we give to that intrinsic susceptibility, implying an intrinsic permanence or endurance in the material which displays susceptibility, such as makes it possible for what the soul feels or what the soul creates to write down its own record, so that it can be read at will, or if not "at will," at least can be read, if the proper stimulus or shock be applied.

Memory is not the cause of the soul's concrete identity. The soul's concrete identity is the cause or natural ground of memory. Memory is the "passive-active" power by means of which the concrete identity of the soul grows richer, fuller, more articulate, more complex and more subtle.

In looking back over these eleven attributes of the "soul-monad," what we have to remark is, that two of the number differ radically in their nature from the rest. The attribute of emotion differs from the rest in the sense that it is the living substantial unity or ultimate synthesis in which they all move. It is indeed more than this. For it is the actual "stuff" or "material" out of which they are all, so to speak, "made" or upon which they all, so to speak, inscribe their diverse creations.

The permanent "surface," or identical susceptibility, of this ebbing and flowing stream of emotion is memory; but the emotion itself, divided into the positive and negative "pole," as we say of love and malice, is an actual projection upon the objective universe of the intrinsic "stuff" or psycho-material "substance" of which the substratum of the soul is actually composed. The other aspects of the soul are, so to speak, the various "tongues" of diversely coloured flame with which the soul pierces the "objective mystery"; but the substance of all these flames is one and the same. It is the soul itself, projected upon the plane of material impression; and thus projected, becoming the conflicting duality to which I give the name of "emotion."

The attribute of "will," also, differs radically from the rest; in the sense that "will" is the power which the soul possesses of encouraging or suppressing, re-vivifying or letting fade, all the other attributes of the soul, including that attribute which is the substance and synthesis of them all and which I name "emotion."

In regard to "emotion" the will can do three separate things. It can encourage the emotion of love and suppress that of malice. It can encourage the emotion of malice and suppress that of love. And finally it can use its energy in the effort, an effort which can never be totally successful, to suppress all emotion, of any kind at all.

Man's complex vision then consists, in simple terms, of self-consciousness, reason, taste, imagination, conscience, instinct, sensation, intuition, will, memory, and emotion. These various activities, differentiated clearly enough in their separate energizing, must never be regarded as absolutely separate "faculties," but rather as relatively separated "aspects." Behind all of them and under all of them is the complex vision itself, felt by all of us in rare moments in its creative totality, but constantly being distorted and obscured as one or other of its primal energies invades the appropriate territory of some other.

The complex vision must not be regarded as the mere sum or accumulated agglomeration of all these. It is much more than this. It is more than a mere formal focussing of its own attributes. It is more than a mere logical unity suspended in a vacuum.

The complex vision is the vision of a living self, of an organic personality, of an actual soul-monad. It may be the vision of a man. It may be the vision of a plant or a planet or a god. It may be the vision of entities undreamed of and of existences inconceivable. It may be the vision, for example, of some strange "soul of space" or "soul of the ether" whose consciousness is extended throughout the visible universe and even throughout the "etherial medium" which binds all souls together.

But whether the vision of a plant, a man, or a god, the complex vision seems to bring with it its own immediate revelation that where there is any form of "matter," however attenuated, such "matter" is the outward expression of some inward living soul whose energies have some mysterious correspondence to the eleven aspects of the soul of man.

CHAPTER III.

THE SOUL'S APEX-THOUGHT

It now becomes necessary to discuss the connection between what I have named the soul's "apex-thought" and certain permanent aspects of life with which this "apex-thought" has to deal.

The "apex-thought" is the name I give to that synthetic and concentrating effort of the soul by means of which the various energies of the complex vision are brought into focus and fused with one another. In accordance with my favourite metaphorical image, the "apex-thought" is the extreme point of the arrow-head of the soul; the point with which it pierces its ways into eternity.

It is necessary that I should indicate the connection between the activity of this apex-point of the complex vision and the various perplexing human problems round which our controversies smoulder and burn. It is advisable that I should indicate the connection between the activity of this "apex-thought" and that thing which the world has agreed to call Religion.

It is advisable that I should indicate the relation of the "apex-thought" to those recurrent moods of profound human scepticism wherein we deny the attainability of any "truth" at all.

It is advisable that I should indicate the relation of the apex-thought to any possible "new organ of vision" with which some unforeseen experiment of the soul may suddenly endow us. And it is above all advisable that I should show the relation between this focussed synthesis of the soul's complexity and the actual physical body whose material senses are part of this complexity.

The whole problem of the art of life may be said to lie in the question of co-ordination. The actual process of coordination is the supreme and eternal difficulty. Only at rare moments do we individually approximate to its achievement. Only once or twice, it may be, in a whole life-time, do we actually achieve it. But it is by the power and insight of such fortunate moments that we attain whatever measure of permanent illumination adds dignity and courage to our days.

We live by the memory of such moments. We live by the hope of their return. In the meanwhile our luck or our ill luck, as living human beings, depends on no outward events or circumstances but on our success in the conscious effort of approximation to what, when it does arrive, seems to take the grace and ease and inevitable beauty of a free gift of the gods.

This fortunate rhythm of the primordial energies of the complex vision may be felt and realized without being expressed in words. The curse of what we call "cleverness" is that it hastens to find facile and fluent expression for what cannot be easily and fluently expressed. Education is too frequently a mere affair of words, a superficial encouragement of superficial expression. It is for this reason that many totally uneducated persons achieve, unknown to all except their most intimate friends, a far closer approach to this difficult co-ordination than others who are not only well-educated but are regarded by the world as famous leaders of modern thought.

It will be remarked that in my list of the primordial energies of the complex vision I do not mention religion. This is not because I do not recognize the passionate and formidable role played by religion in the history of the human race, nor because I regard the "religious instinct" as a thing outgrown and done with. I have not included it because I cannot regard it as a distinct and separate attribute, in the sense in which reason, conscience, intuition and so forth, are distinct and separate attributes, of the complex vision.

I regard it as a name given in common usage to certain premature and disproportioned efforts at co-ordination among these attributes, and I am well content to apply the word "religion" to that sacred ecstasy, at once passionate and calm, at once personal and impersonal, which suffuses our being with an unutterable happiness when the energies of the complex vision are brought into focus. I regard the word religion as a word that has drawn and attracted to itself, in its descent down the stream of time, so rich and so intricate a cargo of human feelings that it has come to mean too many things to be any longer of specific value in a philosophical analysis.

Any sort of reaction against the primeval fear with which man contemplates the unknown, is religion. The passionate craving of human beings for a love which changes not nor passes away, is religion.

The desperate longing to find an idea, a principle, a truth, a "cause," for the sake of which we can sacrifice our personal pleasure and our personal selfishness, is religion.

The craving for some unity, some synthesis, some universal meaning in the system of things, is religion. The desire for an "over-life" or an "over-world," in which the distress, disorder, misunderstandings and cruelties of our present existence are redeemed, is religion.

The desire to find something real and eternal behind the transient flow of appearance, is religion. The desire to force upon others by violence, by trickery, by fire, by sword, by persecution, by magic, by persuasion, by eloquence, by martyrdom, an idea which is more important to us than life itself, is religion.

It will be seen from this brief survey of the immense field which the word "religion" has come to cover, that I am justified in regarding it rather as a name given to the emotional thrill and ecstatic abandonment which accompanies any sort of co-ordination of the attributes of the complex vision, proportioned or disproportioned, than as a distinct and separate attribute in itself.

Only when the co-ordination of our human activities rises to the height of a supreme music, can we regard "religion" as the most beautiful and most important of all human experiences. And at the moment when it takes this form it resolves itself into nothing more than an unutterable feeling of ecstasy produced by the sense that we are in harmony with the rest of the universe. Religion, as I am compelled to think of it, resolves itself into that reaction of unspeakable happiness produced in us, when by any kind of synthetic movement, however crude, we are either saved from unreality or reconciled to reality.

Religion is, in fact, the name we give to the ecstasy in the heart of the complex vision, when, in any sort of coordination between our contradictory energies, we at once escape from ourselves and realize ourselves. We are forbidden to speak of the "religious sense" or the "religious instinct" because, truly interpreted, religion is not a single activity among other activities, but the emotional reaction upon our whole nature when that nature is functioning in its creative fulness.

Religion must therefore be regarded as the culminating ecstasy of the art of life, or as a premature snatching at such an ecstasy while the art of life is still discordant and inchoate. In the first instance it is the supreme reward of the creative act. In the second instance it is a tragic temptation to rest by the way in a unity which is an illusive unity and in a heaven from which "the sun of the morning" is excluded. It thus comes about that what we call religion is frequently a hindrance to the rhythm of the apex-thought. It may be a sentimental consolation. It may be an excuse for cruelty and obscurantism. There is always a danger when it is thus prematurely manifested, that it should darken, distort, deprave and obstruct the movement of creation.

At this point, an objection arises to our whole method of research which it is necessary to meet at once. This objection, a peculiarly modern one, is based upon the theory, handed about in modern literature as a kind of diploma of cleverness and repeated superficially by many who are not really sceptical at all, that it is impossible in this world to arrive, under any circumstances, at any kind of truth.

Persons who repeat this sceptical dogma are simply refusing to acknowledge the evidence of their own experience. However rare our high rhythmic moments may be, some sort of approximation to them, quite sufficient to destroy the validity of this absolute scepticism, must, if a person honestly confesses the truth, and does not dissimulate out of intellectual pride, have entered into the experience of every human being.

Let us, however, consider the kind of dogmatic language which these sceptics use. They speak of "life" as a thing which so perpetually changes, expands, diminishes, undulates, advances, recedes, evolves, revolves, explodes, precipitates, lightens, darkens, thins, thickens, hardens, softens, over-brims, concentrates, grows shallow, grows deep, that it were ridiculous even to attempt to create an equilibrium, or rhythmic "parting-of-the-ways," out of such evasive and treacherous material.

My answer to this sceptical protest is a simple one. It is an appeal to human experience. I maintain that this modern tendency to talk dogmatically and vaguely about "the evasive fluidity of life" is nothing more than a crafty pathological retreat from the formidable challenge of life. It is indeed a kind of mental drug or spiritual opiate by the use of which many unheroic souls hide themselves from the sardonic stare of the eternal Sphinx. It is a weakness comparable to the weakness of many premature religious syntheses; and it has the same soothing and disintegrating effect upon the creative energy of the mind.

What, as a matter of fact, hurts us all, much more than any tendency of life to be over-fluid and over-evasive, is the atrocious tendency of life to be inflexible, rigorous, implacable, harshly immobile. This vague dogmatic sentiment about "the fluidity of life," is one of the instinctive ways by which we try to pretend that our prison-walls are not walls at all, but only friendly and flowing vapour. None of the great works of art and poetry, the austere beauty of which reflects the real nature of the universe, could continue to exercise their magical power upon us, could continue to sustain us and comfort us, if those tragic ultimate realities were not ultimate realities.

The sublime ritual of art, which at its noblest has the character of religion, could not exist for a moment in a world as softly fluctuating and as dimly wavering as this modern scepticism would make it. Life is at once more beautiful and far more tragic. Though surrounded by mystery the grand outlines of the world remain austerely and sternly the same. The sun rises and sets. The moon draws the tides. Man goes forth to his work and his labour until the evening. Man is born; man loves and hates; man dies. And over him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. And under him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. Time, with its seasons, passes him in unalterable procession. From birth to death his soul wrestles with the universe; and the drama of which he is the protagonist lifts the sublime monotony of its scenery from the zenith to the nadir.

Let any man ask himself what it is that hurts him most in life and yet seems most real to him. He will be compelled to answer . . . "the atrocious regularity of things and their obscene necessity." The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is fluid; life brims over."

This sceptical dogma of "evasiveness" is generally found in alliance with some vague modern "religion" whose chief object is to strip the world of the dignity of its real tragedy and endow it with the indignity of some pretended assurance. This is the role of that superficial optimism so inherently repugnant to the aesthetic sense.

Such apologists for a shallow and ignoble idealism are in the habit of declaring that "the tendency of modern thought" is to render "materialism" unthinkable; but when these people speak of materialism they are thinking of the austere limits of that vast objective spectacle into which we are all born. This spectacle is indeed mysterious. It is indeed staggering and awful. But it is irrevocably there. And no vague talk about the "evasiveness" and "over-brimmingness" of life can alter one jot or tittle of its eternal outlines.

From the sublime terror of this extraordinary drama such persons are anxious to escape, because the iron of it has entered into their souls. They do not see that the only "escape" offered by the reality of things is a change of attitude towards this spectacle, not an assertion that the form of this spectacle is unfixed and wavering. No psychological or mathematical speculation has the power to alter the essential outlines of this spectacle.

If such speculations could alter it, then the aesthetic sense of humanity would be driven to transform itself; and a new aesthetic sense, adapted to this new "evasiveness of life," would have to take its place. Attempts are indeed being made at this very hour to "start fresh" with a new aesthetic sense and only the winnowing process of time and the pressure of personal experience can refute such attempts. Meanwhile all we can do is to note the rejection of such attempts by the verdict of the complex vision; a rejection which indicates that if such attempts are to be successful they must imply the substitution of a new complex vision for the one which humanity has used since the beginning.

In other words they must imply a radical change in the basic attributes of human nature. Humanity, to justify them, must become some sort of super-humanity; and a new world inhabited by a new race must take the place of the world we know. Such an attempt to substitute a new humanity for the old is already conscious of itself in those curious experiments of psychical research which are based upon the hypothesis that some completely new organs of sense are on the point of being discovered. Philosophers who believe in the inherent unchangeableness of our present instrument of research—the complex vision as it now exists—can only look on at these experiments with an attitude of critical detachment; and wait until time and experience have justified or refuted them.

Philosophers who believe in the unchangeableness of the complex vision are bound to recognize that the human will, which is a basic attribute of this vision, must in any case play a considerable part in the creation of the future. But from their point of view the will is, after all, only one of these basic attributes. There is also the aesthetic sense. And the aesthetic sense is totally averse to this new kind of humanity and this new kind of world. The eternal vision of those invisible "sons of the universe," the proof of whose existence is a deduction from the encounters of all actual souls with one another, would seem to be entirely irreconcilable with any new complex vision whose nature had been completely changed.

The visible spectacle of the world with its implied "eternal arbiters" would be transmuted and transfigured by such an upheaval. For as long as the human will, as we know it now, remains in association with the aesthetic sense as we know it now, the creation of the future—however yielding and indetermined— must depend upon the form, the shape, the principle, the prophecy, the premonition, existing from the beginning in the nature of things. And it is precisely this shape, this form, this principle, this hope, this dream, this essential motive of those sons of the universe whose existence is implied "when two and three are gathered together," which would be destroyed and annihilated, if the complex vision were transformed into something else and a new world took the place of the old.

It is the existence of these real "immortals" confronting this real universe which makes possible the feeling we have that in spite of all our differences, some accumulated stream of beauty, truth and goodness, does actually carry the past forward into the future, does actually create the future according to a premonition and a hope which have been there from the beginning.

This is the supreme act of faith of the complex vision. This is the supreme act of faith which saves us at once from our subjective isolation and from the will towards the acceptance of a premature "religion." This is what saves us from any psychological or mathematical or logical speculation, which would contradict this hope or destroy the reality of the universe from which this hope emerges.

When we come to a general consideration of the various attributes of the complex vision we are struck at once by the appalling power they each have, when not held in check, of cancelling one another's contribution. It is for this reason that my newly-coined word was unavoidable if we are to emphasize the synthetic energy of the complex vision when it exercises its control over these diverse attributes and resists their constant tendency to cancel one another. It was precisely to emphasize this synthetic energy of the soul that I have made use of the arbitrary expression "apex-thought." For if we think of these various attributes as shooting forth like flames from the arrowhead of the individual soul, we must think of this coordinating energy as the power which continually draws these flames together when they deviate from their focussed intensity, and continually restores, from its inharmonious dispersion, the concentration of their arrows' point. If we are permitted to use this image of a horizontal pyramid of flames it will be seen how important a part is played by this apex-thought in concentrating the energies of the complex vision so that it can "drive" or "burn" or "pierce" its way into the surrounding mystery.

For this image of an arrow-head of focussed flame which is in constant danger of being dispersed as the flames recede from one another and are blown backwards is only a symbolic way of indicating how difficult it is to pierce with our complicated instrument of research the vast mystery which surrounds us.

All this is mere pictorial metaphor; but in visualizing the human soul as a moving arrow-head, composed of flickering flames that only now and then combine into a sharp point, while at other times the wind drives them apart and bends them back, I am suggesting that the ultimate reality of things is a state of confused movement continually becoming a state of concentrated movement. I am suggesting that the secrets of life only yield themselves up to a movement of desperation. I am suggesting that the spirit of creation is also the spirit of destruction, and that the real object of the energy of creation is to pierce with its burning light the darkness of the objective mystery.

As proof of the necessity of keeping this apex-thought in constant poise, let me reiterate one or two of the philosophical disasters which result from a cessation of its rhythmic function. When the reason, for instance, usurps the whole field and acts in isolation from the imagination and the intuition, it tends to persuade us to deny the very existence of that deepest and most vivid reality of all, the handle of our spear-head, the base of our pyramid, the mysterious entity within us, which we have come, following the traditions of the centuries, to name the "soul." And not only does the soul disappear when the reason thus isolates itself, but another primary revelation of the complex vision, I mean that half-created, half-discovered object of the senses popularly called "matter," disappears with it.

Man's self-consciousness is thus left suspended "in vacuo" with no concrete reality within it and no concrete reality outside it; and "thought-in-the-abstract" becomes the only truth.

But not only can reason thus set itself up in isolated usurpation against such other activities as imagination, intuition, will or taste; it can also divide itself against itself and emerge in completely contradictory functions. In the form of mathematical logic, for instance, it can dispose most drastically of that living organic world which in the form of experimental science it assumes to be the only truth. Again it may happen that reason will arbitrarily ally itself with one or the other of the other attributes and on the strength of such an alliance seek to obliterate all the rest. Thus while it is impossible to avoid the admission that of all these basic attributes reason is the most important, because without it all the rest would be inarticulate and dumb, it remains true that to hold reason in balanced relation to all the rest and to hold its own contradictory tendencies in balanced relation to one another is an undertaking of such extraordinary difficulty that if it were not for the complex vision's possession of that co-ordinating power which I have named its apex-thought, one might well pardon the mood of those persons who use reason to drug reason and who steer their boat into some unruffled backwater of dogma or mysticism.

The necessity of such an infinitely delicate poise or balance or rhythm in these high matters, the necessity of keeping all these conflicting attributes at this exquisite point of suspense between abysses of contradiction, is a necessity which compels us to recognize that philosophy is nothing more or less than the supreme art, and the most difficult of all arts.

Certainly, it seems as though thought has to become in a profound sense rhythmical, has to take to itself the nature of music, before it can become the truth. For the truth does not seem to be a mere picture of the system of things, reflected in the mirror of the mind. The truth seems to be the very system of things itself, become conscious and volitional, changing, growing, living, destroying, creating. Thus it comes about that the thought which plunges into the universe must of necessity, even in that very act, remould and re-fashion the universe. Thus Nature perpetually recreates herself by the passion of her children and is forever re-born as the child of her own offspring.

But if the supreme difficulty of the art of life lies in the maintenance of this rhythm between these primary attributes, it must never be forgotten that these "attributes" are, after all, only aspects of the soul. The soul is each of them, not in each of them. They are not "faculties" through which the soul acts. They are never absolutely distinct from one another. There is something of each of them in every one of them, and every attempt which they make to establish themselves in an independent existence is only an attempt of the soul itself to live a perverted and a discordant, instead of a natural and a harmonious life.

The rarity and difficulty of that high art which brings all these orchestral players into harmony is sufficient cause to account for the scarcity of genuine philosophical thought in this confused world. The human soul, looking desperately round for some calm yet passionate light to save its hours from ruinous waste, turns away in bitter disillusion from the thin dust and the swollen vapour that are offered it.

Out of the logical laboratories of the abstract reason this thin dust is offered; and out of the ideal factories of the wish for superficial comfort this iridescent vapour is poured forth. That burning secret of life, that lovely and terrible reality for which the soul pines is not to be found in any mere outward fact or in any mere subjective intuition.

Such a fact may crumble to pieces and give place to another. Such an intuition may melt into air under the shock of experience. The craving of the soul is not satisfied by the discovery that "matter" resolves itself into "energy," nor is the misery of the heart assuaged by the theory that time is an attribute of fourth-dimensional space. The lamentable beating of blood-stained hands upon the ultimate walls does not cease when we learn that two straight lines can or cannot meet in infinity; nor does the knowledge that history is an "ideal evolution" heal the aching of the world-sorrow.

Could we know for certain that the dead were raised up, even that knowledge would not reduce to silence the bitter cry of the outraged generations. So poisonous and so deep is the pain of life that no kind of knowledge, not even the knowledge that annihilation must at last, sooner or later, end it all, can really heal it.

But truth is not knowledge. Truth is not the recognition of an external fact. Truth is a creative gesture. It is a ritual, a rhythmic poise, a balance deliberately sustained between eternal contradictions. It is the magical touch which reduces to harmony the quivering vibrations of many opposites. It is the dramatic movement of a supreme actor at the climax of an unfathomable drama. It is music resting upon itself; music so exquisite as to seem like silence, music so passionate as to have become calm.

The apex-thought of that pyramid of conflicting flames which we call the complex vision holds itself together at one concentrated point. And this point is the arrow point of our human soul; that soul which is shot across immensity in the eternal war between life and the opposite of life.

Although for the purpose of emphasizing and elucidating the essential nature of this apex-thought it has been found advisable to use such metaphorical and pictorial images as the one just indicated, it must be remembered that what we are actually and in direct experience confronted with is the mystery of a real human personality inhabiting a real human body.

This real personal soul inhabiting a real objective body and surrounded on all sides by a real unfathomable universe, is the original revelation of the complex vision from which there is no escape except by death.

The philosophy of the complex vision finds its starting point in an acceptance of this situation which is nothing more than an acceptance of the complex vision's own harmonious activity. An acceptance of the reality of the human body is an essential part of this harmonious activity because among the aspects of the complex vision are to be found certain attributes, such as sensation, instinct and imagination, which would be negated and rendered abortive if the human body were an illusion.

If the "starting point" of our philosophy demands recognition of the reality of the body, the "ideal" of our philosophy must have a place for the body also. Flesh and blood must therefore play their part in the resultant harmony at which we are all the while aiming; and no contempt for the body, no hatred of the body, no refusal to recognize the supreme beauty and sacredness of the body, can be allowed to distort or pervert our vision.

The activity of the apex-thought, though we have a right to use any metaphorical image we please about it in order to elucidate its nature, must always be considered as using the bodily senses in its resultant rhythm. It must always be considered as using that portion of the objective universe which we name the body as an inevitable "note" in its musical flight from darkness to darkness. It must always be conceived as following the attraction of an eternal vision, in which "the idea of the body" is an imperishable element.

This "eternal vision," which it is the rhythmic motive of the apex-thought to seek, carries with it the witness and "imprimatur" of the gods; and although no man has ever "beheld" the gods, and although the gods by reason of their omnipresent activity, cannot be thought of as being "incarnated," yet since they are living souls, even as we are, and since every living soul has, as the substratum of its identity, what might be called a "spiritual body," there is nothing in the revelation made to us through the activity of our complex vision to forbid our free and even fanciful speculation as to its use, by the very highest of superhuman personalities, even, let us say, by the Christ himself, of this mysterious energy of the soul which I have named the "apex-thought."

CHAPTER IV.

THE REVELATION OF THE COMPLEX VISION

Using then, as our instrument of research, that totality of attributes by which the soul in its rare moments of rhythmic consummation visualizes the world, the question arises—what, in plain untechnical terms, is the revelation made to us by this complex medium? Here, as before, I am anxious, before I venture upon such a hazardous undertaking as an answer to this question, to indicate clearly that what I am attempting to state is a revelation which is common to the experience of all souls, wherever such a thing as the soul exists. The question as to whether or not such an universal revelation is an illusion does not concern us. To call any universal experience "an illusion" is no more and no less illuminating than to call it "an ultimate truth." It is the only reality we are at present in possession of; and we must accept it, or remain in complete scepticism; which is only another name for complete chaos.

The first important discovery which the complex vision makes is the fact that the revelation, thus half-offered to it and half-created by it, is presented simultaneously in all its various aspects. It does not appear to us bit by bit or in succession but "en masse" and in its complete "ensemble." It is of course unavoidable that its aspects should be enumerated one by one and that in such an enumeration one aspect should be placed first and another last. Nevertheless, this "first" and "last" must not be regarded as of any reasonable importance; but as nothing more than an accident of arbitrary choice. All the aspects of this original revelation are linked together. All are dependent upon one another. Among them there is no "first" and "last." All are equally real. All are equally necessary. All are equally inescapable.

The activity of the complex vision, then, makes us aware that we have within us an integral irreducible self, the living personal substratum of our self-consciousness, the "I" of our primordial "I am I." This living personal self is the background of our complex vision. It is the personal "visionary" whose vision we are using. I say we have "within us" such a self. This "within us" is one of the inescapable original revelations. For though our consciousness will be found in its full circle to invade obscure shores and wavering margins, there must always be a return, however far it may wander, to this definite "something" within us which utters the happy or unhappy "I am I."

It is precisely here, in regard to the nature of this "I am I," that it is essential to let the totality of our complex vision speak, and not one or other of its attributes. Nowhere has the fantastic and desolating power of pure abstract reason left to itself done more to distort the general situation than in this matter. It has distorted it in two opposing ways.

It has distorted it metaphysically by completely eliminating this revelation of a personal self, "within us," and it has distorted it scientifically by reducing this personal self to an automatic mechanical phenomenon produced by the action and interaction of unconscious chemical "forces."

To the logic of metaphysical reason there is no concrete living self which can say "I am I" from that definite point in space and time which we indicate by the use of the phrase "within us." According to such logic our "I am I" becomes "an infinity of consciousness" with no local habitation. It becomes a consciousness which includes both the "within" and the "without," a consciousness in which our actual personal self is nothing but an illusory phenomenon, a consciousness which is outside both time and space, a consciousness whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, a consciousness which is pure disembodied "thought," thought without any "thinker," thought contemplating itself as thought, thought in an absolutely empty void.

When to this ultimate "unity of apperception," suspended in a vacuum, consciousness of self is added; when this "consciousness-in-the-abstract" is regarded as an universal self-consciousness, the resultant "I am I" of such an omnipresent being becomes an infinite "I am I" which is nothing less than the unfathomable universe conscious of itself in its totality. Whether consciousness of self be added to this "consciousness-in-the-abstract" or not, it is hard to see how out of this unruffled ocean of identity the actual multifarious world which we feel around us, this world of plants and planets and birds and fishes and mortal men and immortal gods, ever succeeded in getting itself produced at all.

The vague metaphysical phrases about the One issuing forth into the Many, in order to make Itself more completely Itself than it was before, seem to us, when under the influence of our complex vision, no other than the meaningless playing with cosmic tennis balls of some insane universal Juggler.

The second way in which reason, left to itself, has distorted what the complex vision reveals to us about the "I am I," is the scientific or evolutionary way. According to this view which assumes that the objective process of evolution is our only knowable reality, the individual personal "I am I" finds itself resolved into a fatal automatic phenomenon of cause and effect; a phenomenon which has as its "cause" nothing, but the prehistoric chemical movements of "matter" or "energy." The personal self thus considered becomes a momentary vortex in a perpetually changing stream of "states of consciousness" or "ripples of sensation" to each of which vast anterior tides of atavistic forces have contributed their mechanical quota.

The chemical fatality of our nerve-tissues, the psychological fatality of our motive-impulses, leave no space, when they have all been summed up, for any free arbitrary action of an independent self.

And so, just as according to the metaphysical view, the soul disappears in a blur of ideal fatality, according to the scientific view the soul disappears in a nexus of mechanical determinism. As against both these errors, to the complex vision this "soul" within us appears to be something altogether different from the physical body. The experience we have of it, the feeling we have of it, is that it is a definite "something" dwelling "within" the physical body.

This revelation with regard to it is as unmistakable as it is difficult to analyze. That it is here, within us, we feel and know; but as soon as we attempt to subject it to any exact scrutiny it seems to melt away under our hands. The situation is indeed a kind of philosophical tragic-comedy; and is only too indicative of the baffling whimsicality of the whole system of things. Contradiction and paradox at the very basis of life mock our attempt to utter one intelligible word about the thing which is the most real of all things to us.

We are vividly aware of this mysterious personality within us, "the guest and companion of the body," but directly we attempt to lay hold upon the actual substance of it it seems to vanish into thin air. But at least our complex vision, which is its complex vision, reveals to us the fact of its existence; and with its existence once acknowledged, however impossible analysis of it may be, we are able to give a plain and unequivocal denial to all the impersonal conclusions reached by metaphysic and science.

This categorical pronouncement of the complex vision with regard to the "I am I," namely that it is the voice of a living concrete soul within us, is supported historically by an immense weight of human tradition. Belief in the reality of the soul is older and more tenacious than any other human doctrine which our race has ever held. The use of the term "soul" is no more than a bare recognition that behind the consciousness which says "I am I" there is a living entity whose consciousness this is.

With this bare recognition the revelation of the complex vision abruptly stops. It stops with that peculiar and disconcerting suddenness with which it seems to be its nature to stop, whenever it reaches the limit of its scope in any direction. It stops here, with regard to the soul, just as it stops when confronted with the conception of limitlessness, both with regard to space and with regard to time. But the soul at least is ours; a fact that cannot be explained away.

And although we have no right to go a step beyond the bare recognition of its existence and although all words regarding it are misleading if used in any other than a symbolic sense, we must remember that since the complex vision is conscious of itself as a unity, whatever this "something" may be which is the centre and core of our living personality, it must at least be a definite irreducible "monad," "something" that cannot be resolved into anything else, or accounted for by anything else, or explained in terms of anything else, or "caused" by anything else; "something" that may, perhaps, at last be annihilated; but that while it lives must remain the vividest reality we know.

Insanity and disease may obstruct and cloud the soul. Outward circumstances may drive the soul back upon itself. But while it lives it lives in its totality and when it perishes, if it be its destiny to perish, it perishes in its totality.

While the soul lives we may sink into it and have no fear; and yet all the while we have no right to say anything about it except that it exists. Truly it is a tragic commentary upon the drama that we call our life, that we should find our ultimate "rest" and "peace" in so bare, so stark, so austere, so irrational a revelation as this!

But surrounded as we are by the menace of eternal nothingness it is at least something to have at the background of our life a living power of this kind, a power which can endure unafraid the very breaking point of disaster, a power which can contemplate the possibility of annihilation itself with equanimity and unperturbed calm.

It will be noted that I have been compelled to use once and again the term "eternal nothingness." This is indeed an inevitable aspect of what the soul visualizes as possible. For since the soul is the creator and discoverer of all life, when once the soul has ceased to exist, non-existence takes the place of existence, and nothingness takes the place of life.

Speculatively we have the right, although the complex vision is silent on that tremendous question, to dally with the idea of the survival of the soul after the death of the body. But this must for ever be an open question, not to be answered either negatively or affirmatively, not to be answered by the intelligence of any living man. All we can say is that it seems as if the death of the body destroyed the complex vision; and if the complex vision is destroyed it seems as though non-existence were bound to take the place of existence, and as though nothingness were bound to take the place of everything. The oriental conception of "Nirvana" is no more than a soothing opiate administered to a soul that has grown weary of its complex vision and weary of its irreducible personality. To imagine oneself freed from the burden of personal consciousness, and yet in some mysterious way conscious of being freed from consciousness, is a delicious and delicate dream of life-exhausted souls.

As a speculation it has a curious attraction; as a reality it has nothing that is intelligible. But though the tragedy of life to all sensitive spirits is outrageous and obscene, at least we may say that the worst conceivable possibility is not likely to occur. The worst conceivable possibility would be to be doomed to an immortal personal life without losing the restrictions and limitations of our present personal life. If the soul survives the body it must do so on the strength of its possession of some transforming energy which shall enable it to supply the place in its organic being which is at present occupied by the attribute of sensation. It is quite obvious that if the life of the soul depends upon the active functioning of all its attributes; and if one of its attributes, namely sensation, is entirely dependent for its active functioning upon the life of the body; the life of the soul itself must also depend upon the life of the body, unless, as I have hinted, it can transmute its attribute of sensation into some other attribute suitable to some unknown plane of spiritual existence.

There are indeed certain ecstatic moments when the soul feels as if such a power of liberation from the bodily senses were actually within its grasp; but it will inevitably be found, when the great rhythmic concentration of the apex-thought is brought to bear upon such a feeling as this, that it either melts completely away, or is relegated to unimportance and insignificance. Such a feeling, ecstatic and intense though it may have been, has been nothing more than a disproportioned activity of the attribute of intuition; intuition misled in favour of the immortality of the soul, even as the pure reason is often misled in the direction of the denial of the soul's existence.

The revelation of the complex vision has no word to say, on either side, with regard to whether the soul does or does not survive the death of the body; but it has a very distinct word to say as to the importance of this whole question; and what it says in regard to this is—that it is not important at all! The revelation of the complex vision implies clearly enough that what man were wise to "assume"—leaving always the ultimate question as an open question—is that the individual soul and the individual body perish together.

This assumption is in direct harmony with what we actually see; even though it is in frequent collision with what we sometimes feel. But the essence of the matter is to be found in this, that our assumption as to the soul's perishing, when the body perishes, is an assumption, untrue though it may turn out to be, which the soul itself, when under the power of its apex-thought, is compelled to make. And it is compelled to make this assumption by reason of the inherent nature of love. For it is of the nature of love when confronted by two alternatives one of which lays the stress upon personal advantage and the other upon love itself apart from any personal advantage, whether one's own or another's, to choose, as the assumption upon which it shall live, the latter of these two alternatives. For it is the nature of love to seek love and nothing else than love. And as long as the assumption which the soul makes is the assumption that it survives the death of the body, that emotion of love which is the soul's creative essence is debarred from the full and complete integrity of its desire.

For the desire of love is not for immortality but for the eternal; and the eternal is not something that depends upon the survival of any individual soul, whether our own or another's. The eternal is something which can be realized in one single moment; something which completely destroys in us any desire for survival after death; something which reconciles us to existence considered in the light of love alone; something that does not assume anything at all about the universe, except that love exists.

Thus we return to that assumption about the soul, which it is better—leaving the open question still an open question—for the mind to accept as its working assumption; namely that the soul uses the body in its own ends, is conscious of its existence through the senses of the body, lives in the body, and perishes when the body perishes. Nor is it only the emotion of love which rejects the dogma of the immortality of the soul. Were the soul proved beyond all possibility of doubt to be immortal, there would at once fall upon us a despair more appalling than any which we have known. For just as the idea of the eternal satisfies the very depths of our soul with an infinite peace, so the idea of immortality troubles the very depths of our soul with an infinite doubt. Something unutterable in our aesthetic sense demands that life should be surrounded by death and ended by death. Thus and not otherwise should we ourselves have created the world at the beginning. Thus and not otherwise by the rhythmic play of the complex vision, do we create the world.