on 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 a