Introductory material (continued 5)

This idea of the eternal reality of the body springs directly from those ideas of truth, beauty and goodness which are pre-existent in the universe and therefore springs directly from that emotion of love which is the synthesis of these.

The forms and shapes of stars and plants and rivers and hills are all realized and consummated in the form and shape of the human body. The magic of the elements, the mystery of earth and air and water and fire, are incarnated in this miracle of flesh and blood. In the countenance of a human child, in the countenance of a man or a woman, the whole unfathomable drama of life is expressed. The most evil of the children of men, asleep or dead, has in his face something more tragic and more beautiful than all the waters and all the land.

Not to "love" flesh and blood, not to will the eternal existence of flesh and blood, is not to know "love" at all. To loathe flesh and blood, to will the annihilation of flesh and blood, is to be a victim of that original "motiveless malignity" which opposes itself to the creative force.

This insistence upon "the eternal idea of the body" does not necessarily limit "the idea of the body" to the idea of the human body; but practically it does so. And it practically does so because the human body evidently incarnates the beauty and the nobility of all other forms and shapes and appearances which make up our existing universe.

There may be other and different bodies in the unfathomable spaces of the world; but for those among us who are content to deal with the actual experiences which we have, the human body, summing up the magical qualities of all other terrestrial forms and shapes, must, as far as we are concerned, remain our permanent standard of truth and beauty.

The substitution in art, in philosophy, and in religion, of other symbols, for this natural and eternal symbol of the human body is always a sign of a weakening of the creative impulse. It is a sign of a relative disintegration of the power of "love" and a relative concentration of the power of "malice." Thus when, by an abuse of the metaphysical reason, "thought-in-the-abstract" assumes the rights of a personality the principle of love is outraged, because the eternal idea of the body is denied.

And when, by an abuse of the psychological reason, the other activities of the soul are so stressed and emphasized that the attribute of sensation is forgotten, the principle of love is outraged, because the eternal idea of the body is denied. The principle of love, by the necessity of its own nature, demands that the physiological aspect of reality should retain its validity.

When, therefore, we come to consider the relation of this "eternal idea of the body" to those invisible "sons of the universe" whose power of love is inconceivably greater than our own, we are compelled, by the necessity of the complex vision, to encounter one of those ultimate dilemmas from which there appears to be no escape. The dilemma to which we are thus led may be defined in the following manner.

Because the secret of the universe and the ultimate harmony between the pre-existent ideas by which all souls must live can be nothing less than what, in this rarified and heightened sense, we have named "love" and because the objective pattern and standard of this love is the creative energy of those personal souls we have named "the sons of the universe," therefore "the sons of the universe" must be regarded as directing their desire and their will towards what satisfies the inherent nature of such love. And because the inherent nature of such love demands nothing less than the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood, therefore the "sons of the universe" must be regarded as directing their desire and their will towards the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood.

And just as the will and desire of these "invisible companions of men" must be regarded as directed towards the eternalizing of this idea whose magical "stuff of dreams" is one of the objects of their love, so the will and desire of all living souls must be directed towards the eternalizing of this same reality. And because the love of all living souls remains restless and unsatisfied when directed to any object except the "eternal vision" and because when directed to the "eternal vision" such love loses the misery of its craving and becomes satisfied, therefore the "eternal vision" must be regarded as the only object which can ultimately and really satisfy the eternal restlessness of the love of all living souls.

But the inherent nature of love demands, as we have seen, the permanent reality of the physiological aspect of the universe. That is to say, the inherent desire of the love of all living souls is directed towards the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood. From this it follows that since the "eternal vision" satisfies the desire of love "the eternal vision" must include within it the eternal idea of the body.

Both "the sons of the universe," therefore, and all other living souls are compelled, in so far as they give themselves up to the creative energy, to direct their will towards the eternalization of this idea. But is there not an inevitable frustration and negation of this desire and this will?

Are not both the "companions of men" and men themselves denied by the very nature of things the realization of this idea? Is not the love of man for "the sons of the universe" frustrated in its desire in so far as "the sons of the universe" cannot be embodied in flesh and blood? And is not the love of "the sons of the universe" for man frustrated in its desire in so far as the physical form of each individual soul is destroyed by death?

It seems to me that this dilemma cannot be avoided. Love insists on the eternity of the idea of the body. Therefore every soul who loves "the sons of the universe" desires their incarnation. But if "the sons of the universe" could appear in flesh and blood for the satisfaction of any one of their lovers, all other souls in the wide world would lose them as their invisible companions. But although this dilemma cannot in its literal outlines be avoided, it seems that the same inherent nature of love which leads to this dilemma leads also to the vanishing point or gap or lacuna in thought where the solution, although never actually realized, may conceivably exist.

What love desires is the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood. It desires this because the idea of flesh and blood is a necessary aspect of the fulness and completeness of personality. But though the idea of flesh and blood is a necessary aspect of personality, every actual incarnation of personality leaves us aware that the particular soul we love has something more of beauty and nobility than is expressed.

This "something more" is not a mere hypothetical quality but is an actual and real quality which we must assume to exist in the very stuff and texture of the soul. It exists, therefore, in that "vanishing-point of sensation," as I called it, which we have to think of, although we cannot define it, as constituting the soul's essential self. Those pre-existed ideas which find their synthesis in the emotion of love are undoubtedly part of the unfathomable universe. But they are this only because they are interwoven with the unfathomable soul which exists in each of us. The "something," therefore, which is the substratum of the soul and its centre of identity is a thing woven out of the very stuff of these ideas.

This is the "vanishing point of sensation" to which I have referred, the point namely where what we call "mind" blends indissolubly with what we call "matter." The emotion of love which desires the eternalization of the idea of flesh and blood would be on the way to satisfaction, even if it never altogether reached it, if it were able to feel that this beauty and nobility and reality which exist in this "vanishing point of sensation" which is the very self of the soul were actually the living essence of flesh and blood, were, in fact, a real "spiritual body," of which the material body was the visible expression.

It is the inherent nature of love itself, with its craving for reality, which leads us to the verge of this conception; and although this conception can never, as we have seen, become more than a "vanishing-point of sensation" we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that if we were able to define the thing more clearly it would cease at once to be the object of love; because it would cease to be that mysterious fusion of "mind" and "matter" which it is the nature of love to crave.

Without the necessity then that these immortal ones whom I call the "sons of the universe" should satisfy the love of human souls by any physical incarnation, they may be considered as leading such love upon the true way by simply being what they are; that is by being living souls. For, as living souls, they also must possess as the centre of their being, a "spiritual body," or fusion-point of "mind" and "matter," which is the inner reality of flesh and blood.

This "spiritual body" of "the gods" or the "sons of the universe" must necessarily be more noble and more beautiful than any visible embodiment of them could possibly be; though human imagination and human art have a profound right to attempt to visualize such an impossible embodiment; and the purest and most natural form of "religion" would be the form which struggled most successfully to appropriate such a visualization.

And just as the human soul can satisfy something, though not all, of its desire for the eternalizing of flesh and blood in the "spiritual bodies" of these "invisible companions," so the gods can themselves satisfy something, though not all, of their love for the individual soul in the reality of the soul's "spiritual body."

All this may carry to certain minds an ambiguous and even distasteful association; but I think it will only do so to such minds as are reluctant to analyse, to the furthest limit, their own capacity for the kind of "love" I have attempted to describe; and possibly also such minds as are debarred, by some sub-conscious element of "malice" in them, from even desiring to develop such a capacity.

The ambiguity and unsatisfactory vagueness in what I have been attempting to indicate may perhaps be in a measure dissipated by a direct appeal to concrete experience. When one analyses this emotion of love in relation to any actual human object I think it becomes clear that in our attitude to the physical body of the person we love there is a profound element of pity.

The sexual emotion may destroy this pity; and any emotion which is sensual as well as sexual may not only destroy it but turn it into a very different kind of pity; into the "pity," namely, of a torturer for his victim. But I feel I am not wrong in my analysis of the kind of "love" I have in my mind, when I say that the element of pity enters profoundly into our attitude towards the body of the person we love.

It enters into it for this reason; namely because the physical body of the person we love does so inadequately and so imperfectedly express the beauty of such a person's soul. "Love is not love" when the blemishes and defects and maladies of the physical form of the person loved interfere with our love and cause it to diminish. And such blemishes and defects and maladies would interfere with love if love were not in its essence profoundly penetrated by pity.

It may be asked—"how can love, which is naturally associated with beauty and nobility, endure for a moment in the presence of such lamentable hideousness and repulsiveness and offensiveness, as exists in some degree in the physiological aspects of us all?" It is able to endure because in the presence of this what it desires is, as I have said, not so much the actual physical body of the object of its love as the "eternal idea" of such a body.

When the individual soul allows itself to demand with too desperate a craving the actual incarnation of these "sons of the universe" it is in reality false to its desire for the "eternal idea of the body," because no actual incarnation of these immortal ones could realize in any complete sense this "eternal idea."

In the same way when we feel the emotion of love towards any human soul, our attitude towards the physical form of such a soul must of necessity be profoundly penetrated by pity and by a tender and humorous recognition that such a physical form only expresses a very limited portion of the unfathomable soul which we love.

If, with a desperate craving to contradict the essential nature of love, we insist upon regarding the physical body as the complete expression of the soul, we fall into the same fatal weakness as that into which those fall who demand a physical incarnation of the "companions of men," and along with such as these we are false to love's true craving for the "eternal idea of flesh and blood."

In other words, this craving of love for "the eternal idea of the body" does not imply that we are false to love when we are unable to change our natural repugnance in the presence of the repulsive and the offensive into attraction to these things. Love certainly does not mean a morbid attraction to what is unattractive. The sexual emotion, the emotion which we call "being in love," does sometimes include this morbidity, just because, by reason of its physiological origin, it tends to remain the slave of the physiological. But although love does not imply a morbid attraction to the repulsive and the offensive, and although the presence of the repulsive and offensive in connection with those we love is a proof to us that "the eternal idea of the body," is not realized in the actual body, it is clear that "love is not love" when it allows itself to be diminished or destroyed by the presence of these things.

What love really demands, both with regard to the universe and with regard to any individual soul in the universe, is not so much the retention of the physiological aspect of these things, as we know them now, but of the physiological aspect of them implied in such a phrase as "the eternal idea of matter" or "the eternal idea of flesh and blood."

It may be put still more simply by saying that what love demands is the existence of something in what we call "matter" or the "body" which guarantees the eternal reality of these aspects of life. It does not demand that we should love the repulsive, the offensive, the false, or the evil, because these exist in the bodies and the souls of those we love.

Everything in the universe partakes of the eternal duality. The hideous, the false and the evil are not confined to what we call "mind" but exist in what we call "matter" also. Consequently love, when in its craving for complete reality it demands "the eternal idea of the body" does not demand that this eternal idea should be realized in any actual body.

When a demand of this kind is made, it is not made by love but by the sexual instinct, and it is invariably doomed to a ghastly disillusion. For it is just this very craving, namely that in some actual human body "the eternal idea of the body" should be realized, that the sweet and terrible madness of sexual love continually implies. But real love, the love which is the supreme synthesis of those ideas which represent the creative power in the ultimate duality, can never be disillusioned.

And it cannot be disillusioned because it is able to see, beneath the chaotic litter and unessential debris of "matter," the eternal idea of "matter" and because it is able to see, under the lamentable repulsiveness and offensiveness of so much actual flesh and blood, "the eternal idea of flesh and blood."

Love's attitude toward this element of litter and chaos in the universe is sometimes an attitude of humorous toleration and sometimes an attitude of destructive fire. Love's attitude towards the repulsive and the offensive in human souls and bodies is sometimes an attitude of humorous toleration and sometimes an attitude of destructive fire.

But along with this passion of destruction, which is so essential a part of the passion of creation, and along with this humorous indulgence, there necessarily mingles, where human beings are concerned, an element of profound pity. The best concrete example of the mood I am trying to indicate is the emotion which any one would naturally feel in the presence of some torturer or tyrant whom he had slain, or even whom he had surprised asleep. For the prerogative of both sleep and death is that they obliterate the repulsive elements of flesh and blood and set free its eternal idea.

And this is true of death even after the ghastly process of chemical dissolution has actually begun. A loathing of matter as matter, a hatred and contempt for the body as the body, is therefore a manifestation not of love but of the opposite of love. Such a loathing of the physiological is a sign of a weakening of the creative energy. It is also a sign of the stiffening of the resistant "malice," or "motiveless malignity," which opposes creation. What the energy of love directs its desire and its will towards, is first the "eternal idea of the soul," the idea of the rhythmic harmony of "mind" and "matter" fused and lost in one another, and then "the eternal idea of the body," the idea of the rhythmic projection of this invisible harmony upon the visible fabric of the world.

Thus we arrive at the only definition of the nature of love which is satisfactory to the deepest moments of feeling experienced by the human soul. In such moments the soul gathers itself together on the verge and brink of the unknown. Something beyond the power of our will takes possession then of all that we are. In our momentary and transitory movement of the complex vision we are permitted to pass across the ultimate threshold.

We enter then that mysterious rhythm which I have called "The Eternal Vision"; and in place of our desire for personal immortality, in place of our desire for the possession of any person or thing, in place of our contemplation of "forces" and "energies" and "evolution" or "dissolution," in place of our struggle for "existence" or for "power," we become suddenly aware that in the outflowing and reciprocal inter-action of the emotion of love there is something that reduces all these to insignificance, something that out of the very depths of the poisonous misery of the world and the irony of the world and the madness of the world utters its defiant Rabelaisian signal, "Bon espoir y gist au fond."

CHAPTER IX.

THE NATURE OF THE GODS

We must now return to our original definition of the true philosophical instrument of research in order to see if we can secure from it a clearer notion as to the nature of the Gods. Such an instrument is, as we have seen, the apex-thought of the complex vision using all its attributes in rhythmic unison. For the complex vision using all its attributes in unison is only another name for the soul using the body and using something more than the body.

If the soul could use no attributes except those given to it by the body, it might, or it might not, arrive at the idea of the "sons of the universe." It certainly could not enter into any relation with such immortal beings. But since it has arrived at such a conception "it is impossible for it ever to fall entirely away from what it has reached." For the same unfathomable duality which gave birth to the sons of the universe has given birth to men; and between these two, between the ideal figures who cannot perish and the generations of souls who for ever appear and for ever pass away there is an eternal understanding. And the understanding between these two depends upon the fact that they are both children of the same unfathomable duality.

But this duality which is the cause why the universe is the universe and not something other than the universe, must remain as great a mystery to the souls of the "companions of men" as it is to all the souls in the world who recognize them as their ideal.

We cannot escape the impression that this complex vision of ours, which is our instrument of research and which leaves us in the presence of an unfathomable duality, finds a parallel in the complex vision of the sons of the universe which is their instrument of research and which leaves them also in the presence of an unfathomable duality. We cannot escape from the impression that to these children of the eternal duality the mystery of this duality is as dark as it is to ourselves.

They find themselves struggling to overcome malice with love, even as we find ourselves struggling to overcome malice with love. They find themselves driven to creation and destruction. The complex vision, which is their instrument of research, is baffled in the same way as the complex vision which is our instrument of research.

If, therefore, in our desperate struggle with the unfathomable nature of this duality, we demand why it is that the gods have failed, in spite of their love, to give us any clue to some ultimate reconciliation, the answer must be that such an ultimate reconciliation is as much beyond the reach of their vision as it is beyond the reach of ours. The attainment of such a reconciliation would seem to mean the absolute end of life as we know it and of creation as we know it. Such a reconciliation would seem to mean nothing less than the swallowing up of the universe in unthinkable nothingness.

The truth is that in this ultimate revelation of the complex vision we are confronted with an inevitable triad, or trinity, of primordial aspects. We are compelled to think of a plurality of living souls of which our own is one; of certain ideal companions of all souls whose vision gives to our vision its objective value; and of an external universe which is the creation of this vision.

What the complex vision indicates, therefore, is a system of things which has a monistic aspect, for there is only one space and only one succession of time; a pluralistic aspect, for the system of things gives birth continually to innumerable individual souls; and a dualistic aspect, for the universe itself is created by the struggle between love and malice.

What the complex vision does not indicate is any ultimate principle which reduces this complex system of things to the unbroken mass of one integral unity. The nearest approach to such an unbroken, integral unity is to be found in that indefinable "medium" which makes it possible for the innumerable souls which compose the universe to communicate with one another and with their invisible pre-existent companions. It is only the existence of this indefinable medium which makes it possible for us to speak of a universe at all. For this medium is the objective ground, or basis, so to say, from the midst of which each individual vision creates its own universe, always appealing as it does so to that objective standard or pattern of truth offered by the vision of man's invisible companions. What we roughly and loosely call "the universe" or "nature" is therefore an accumulated projection or creation of all the souls which exist, held together by this pervading medium which enables them to communicate with one another. In this eternal process of creating the universe by their united visions, all these souls must inevitably appeal, consciously or unconsciously, to the vision of their pre-existent companions.

The best justification which can be offered for the expression sons of the universe as applied to these invisible companions is to be found in the inevitable anthropomorphism of all human thought. The breaking point, so to speak, of man's vision, that ecstasy of comprehension which I call his apex-thought, is the moment which makes him aware of these companions' existence. And, at this ecstatic moment, all individual souls find their personality deepened to such a point that they feel themselves possessed of the very secret of the ultimate duality, feel themselves to be, in fact, unfathomable personifications of that duality. And their intimation or vision with regard to the gods presents itself to them at that moment as the very nature and true being of the gods. Yet it must be remembered that this intimation is a thing which we reach only by pain and exquisite effort; is a thing, in fact, which is the culminating point of an elaborate and difficult "work of art" requiring a rhythm and a harmony in our nature attained by no easy road.

Since, therefore, the reality of these invisible companions though implied in all our intercourse with one another, is only visualized as actual and authentic when our subjective vision is at its highest point, and since when our subjective vision is at its highest point it conveys the sensation, rightly or wrongly, that what we call our "universe" is their universe also, it is not without justification that we use the anthropomorphic expression "the sons of the universe" to describe these invisible companions.

This expression, the sons of the universe, this idea of an objective standard of all ideas, is something that we attain with difficulty and not something that we just pick up as we go along. The "objective," in this sense, is the supreme attainment of the "subjective." And although when we have found these companions they become real and actual, we must not forget that, in the long process of escaping from the subjectivity of ourselves into the objectivity of their existence, it was our own subjective vision with the rhythmic ecstasy of its apex-thought which led us to the brink of this discovery. Thus the expression "the sons of the universe" finds its justification. For they are the objective discovery, as well as the objective implication, of all our human and subjective visions. We and they together create the universe and together become the "children" of the world we create.

And although the universe when thus created remains the creation of man, assisted by the gods, it now presents itself to us, in its acquired and attained objectivity, as a pre-existent thing which is rather our parent than our creation. This objective reality of it, with the inevitable implication that it existed before we came on the scene at all, and will exist after we have disappeared from the scene, is a truth towards which our subjective vision has led us, but which, when once we reach it, seems to become independent of our subjective vision.

Here again, therefore, in connection with the universe as in connection with the gods, the creation of our subjectivity is found to be something independent of our subjectivity and something that, all the while, has been implicit in the energy of our subjective vision. And precisely as the subjective vision of man creates the companions of men and then discovers them to be an objective reality, so the subjective vision of man creates the universe and then discovers the universe to be an objective reality. And in both cases this discovering finds its justification in a recognition that the idea of this resultant objectivity was implicit in the subjective energy from the beginning. But the universe once created or discovered, is found to be the eternal manifestation of that ultimate duality which is the essence of our own souls and of the souls of the immortals.

In no other way can we think of the objectivity of the universe; for in no other way can we think of ourselves. And because it is the evocation of that ultimate duality which is the very stuff and texture of our creative vision, the universe becomes naturally the parent of man's invisible companions as it becomes the parent of man himself. And thus are we justified in speaking of these mysterious ones as the "sons of the universe."

It is out of pain and grief that we arrive at the conception of the nature of the gods. "Those who have not eaten their bread with tears, they know them not, the Heavenly Powers!" Pain and sorrow, both physical and mental, seem to soften the porous shell, so to speak, of the human intelligence, seem to throw back certain shutter-like shards or scales with which it protects its malignant ignorance.

It is when our loneliness becomes intolerable, it is when the poisonous teeth of the eternal malice in Nature have us by the throat, it is when our malice rises up, in the miserable torture of hatred, to answer the malice of the system of things, that, out of the depths, we cry to the darkness which surrounds us for some voice or some signal that shall give us an intimation of help. Merely to know that our wretched pain is known to some one besides ourselves is an incredible relief. Merely to know that some sort of superhuman being, even without special preoccupation with human fate, can turn an amused or an indulgent clairvoyance towards our wretchedness, can "note" it with dispassionate sympathy, as we note the hurts of animals or plants, is a sort of consolation. It is a relief to know that what we feel when we are hurt to the breaking-point is not absolutely wasted and lost in the void, but is stored up in an immortal memory along with many other pains of the same kind. That cry, "Only He do know what I do suffer" of the Wessex peasant is a cry natural to the whole human race. It is not that we ask to be confronted and healed by our immortal friend. We ask merely that our sorrows should not be altogether drowned in the abyss as though they had never been. There is a certain outrage about this annihilation of the very memory of pain against which humanity protests.

But it is necessary at this point to beware of the old pathetic fallacy of human thought, the fallacy of assuming that to be true, which we desire to be true. What our complex vision reveals as to the nature of the gods does not satisfy in any obvious or facile manner this bitter need of humanity. If it did so satisfy it, then for some profound and mysterious reason man's own aesthetic sense would revolt against it, would indignantly reject it, as too smooth an answer to life's mystery.

For man's aesthetic sense seems in some strange way to be in league with a certain inveterate tragedy in things, which no facile optimism can ever cajole or melt.

That the gods are aware of our existence can hardly be doubted. That they feel pity for us, in this or that significant hour, can easily be imagined. That the evil in us draws towards us what is evil in them seems likewise a not unnatural possibility. That the love in us draws towards us the love in them is a thing in complete accordance with our own relation to forms of life lower than ourselves. That even at certain moments the gods may, by a kind of celestial vampirizing, use the bodily senses of men to "fill out," as it were, what is lacking in their own materiality, is a conceivable speculation.

But it is not in any definite relation between the individual soul of man and the individual soul of any one of the immortals that our hope lies. If this were all that we could look for, our condition would be as miserable as the condition of those unhappy ones who seek intermittent and fantastic relief in attempted intercourse with the psychic and the occult.

Our hope lies in that immemorial and traditional human gesture which has, in the unique figure of Christ, gathered up and focused, as it were, all the vague and floating intimations of super-human sympathy, all the shadowy rumours and intimations of super-human help, which move to and fro in the background of our apprehension.

The figure of Christ has thus become something more than a mere name arbitrarily given by us to some nameless god. The figure of Christ has become a symbol, an intermediary, a kind of cosmic high-priest, standing between all that is mortal and all that is immortal in the world, and by means of the love and pity that is in him partaking of the nature of every living thing.

When, therefore, out of the bitterness of our fate we cry aloud upon the Unknown, the answer to our cry comes from the heart of Christ. In other words it comes from the epitome and personification of all the love in the universe. For to the figure of Christ has been brought, down the long ages of the world, all the baffled, thwarted, broken, unsatisfied love in every soul that has ever lived. It is in the heart of Christ that all the nameless sorrows and miseries, of the innumerable lives that Nature gives birth to, are stored up and remembered. Not one single pang, felt by plant or animal or bird or fish or man or planet, but is embalmed for ever in that mysterious store-house of the universal pity. Thus, if there were no other superhuman Beings in the world and if apart from the creative energy of all souls Christ would never have existed, as it is now He does exist because He has been created by the creative power of all souls.

But while in one sense the figure of Christ is the supreme work of art of the world, the culminating achievement of the anonymous creative energy of all souls, the turning of the transitory into the eternal, of the mortal into the immortal, of the human into the divine; in another sense the figure of Christ is a real and living personality, the one personality among the gods, whose nature we may indeed assume that we understand and know.

How should we not understand it, when it has been in so large a measure created by our sorrow and our desire?

But the fact that the anonymous striving of humanity with the objective mystery has in a sense created the figure of Christ does not reduce the figure of Christ to a mere Ideal. As we have seen with regard to the primordial ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness, nothing can be an Ideal which has not already, in the eternal system of things, existed as a reality.

What we call the pursuit of truth, or the creation of truth, what we call the pursuit of beauty or the creation of beauty, is always a return to something which has been latent in the eternal nature of the system of things. In other words, in all creation there is a rediscovery, just as in all discovery there is creation.

The figure of Christ, therefore, the everlasting intermediary between mortality and immortality, has been at once created and discovered by humanity. When any living soul approaches the figure of Christ, or cries aloud upon Christ out of the depths of its misery, it cries aloud upon all the love that has ever existed in the world. It enters at such a moment into definite communion with all the suffering of all the dead and with all the suffering of all the unborn.

For in the heart of Christ all the dead are gathered up into immortality, and all their pain remembered. In the heart of Christ all the unborn live already, in their pain and in their joy; for such pain and such joy are latent in the ultimate duality of love and malice, and in the heart of Christ this ultimate duality struggles with such terrible concentration that all the antagonisms which the procession of time evokes, all the "moments" of this abysmal drama, in the past, in the present, in the future, are summed up and comprehended in what that heart feels.

The ancient human doctrine of "vicarious suffering," the doctrine that upon the person of Christ all the sins and sorrows of the world are laid, is not a mere logical conclusion of a certain set of theological axioms; but is a real and true secret of life, discovered by our most intimate experience.

The profoundest of all the oracles, uttered out of the depths, is that saying of Jesus about the "losing" of life to "save" it. This "losing of life" for Christ's sake is that ultimate act of the will by which the lusts of the flesh, the pride of life, the possessive instinct, the hatred of the body, the malice which resists creation, the power of pride, are all renounced, in order that the soul may enter into that supreme vision of Christ, wherein by a mysterious movement of sympathy, all the struggles of all living things are comprehended and shared.

Thus it is true to say that the object of life for all living souls is the eternal vision. Towards the attainment of the eternal vision the love in all living souls perpetually struggles; and against the attainment of the eternal vision the malice in all living souls perpetually struggles. We arrive, therefore, at the only adequate conception of the nature of the gods which the complex vision permits us.

The nature of the gods, or of the immortals, or, as I have preferred to call them, the sons of the universe, is a nature which corresponds to our nature, even as our nature corresponds to the nature of animals or of plants. The ultimate duality is embodied in the nature of the gods more richly, more beautifully, more terribly, in a more dramatic and articulate concentration, than it is embodied in our nature. Between us and the gods there must be a reciprocal vibration, as there is a reciprocal vibration between us and plants and beasts and oceans and hills. The precise nature of such reciprocity may well be left a matter for vague and unphilosophical speculation; because the important aspect of it, in regard to the mystery of life and the object of life, is not the method or manner of its functioning but the issue and the result of its functioning. And this issue and result of the reciprocity between mortal and immortal, between man and his invisible companions, is the eternal vision which they both share, the vision in which love attains its object.

And the eternal vision, which was, and is, and is to come, is the vision in which Christ, the Intermediary between the transitory and the permanent, contemplates the spectacle of the unfathomable world; and is able to endure that spectacle, by reason of the creative power of love.

CHAPTER X.

THE FIGURE OF CHRIST

In considering the figure of that great Intermediary between mortality and immortality whom we have come to name Christ, the question arises, in view of the historic existence of other world-saviours, such as the Indian Buddha, whether it would not be better to invent, out of our arbitrary fancy, some completely new symbol for the eternal vision which should be entirely free from those merely geographical associations which have limited the acceptance of this Figure to so much less than one-half of the inhabitants of our planet.

The question arises—can there be invented any concrete, tangible symbol which shall appeal to every attribute of the complex vision and be an accumulated image of that side of the unfathomable duality from which we draw our ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness?

For the complex vision itself I have projected my own arbitrary image of an arrow-head of many concentrated flames; but when we approach a matter as important as the choice of a symbolic image for the expression of the ultimate synthesis of the good as contrasted with the evil something very different from a mere subjective fancy is required.

If it were possible for me, the present writer, to give myself up so completely to the creative spirit as to become suddenly inspired with the true idea of such a symbolic image, even then my image would remain detached, remote and individualistic. If it were possible for me to gather up, as it were, and to bring into focus all the symbolic images used by all the supreme prophets and artists and poets of the world, my synthetic symbol, including all these different symbols, would still remain remote and distant from the feelings and experiences of the mass of humanity.

But the ideas of truth, beauty, goodness, together with that emotion of love which is their synthesis, are not confined to the great artists and prophets of the world. They are felt and experienced by the common mass of humanity. They have indeed an even wider scope than this, since they exist in the depths of the souls of the sons of the universe, and in the depths of that unfathomable universe whose objective reality depends upon their energy. They have the widest scope which it is possible for the complex vision to grasp. Wherever time and space are, they are; and, as we have seen, time and space make up the ultimate unity within whose limits the drama of life proceeds.

Although the universe depends for its objective reality upon the vision of the immortals and incidentally upon all the visions of all the souls born into the world, it is not true to say that either the vision of the immortals or the visions of all souls, or even both of these together, exhaust the possibilities of the universe and sound the depths of its unfathomableness. The complex vision of man stops at a certain point; but the unfathomable nature of the universe goes on beyond that point. The complex vision, of the immortals stops at a definite point; but the unfathomable nature of the universe goes on beyond that point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XI.

THE ILLUSION OF DEAD MATTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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