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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III.

THE SOUL'S APEX-THOUGHT

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

The "apex-thought" is the name I give to that synthetic and
concentrating effort of the soul by means of which the various
energies of the complex vision are brought into focus and fused