conscious of itself in its totality. Whether
consciousness of self be added to this "consciousness-in-the-abstract"
or not, it is hard to see how out of this unruffled ocean of identity
the actual multifarious world which we feel around us, this world of
plants and planets and birds and fishes and mortal men and immortal
gods, ever succeeded in getting itself produced at all.

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

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

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

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

This revelation with regard to it is as unmistakable as it is difficult
to analyze. That it is here, within us, we feel and know; but as
soon as we attempt to subject it to any exact scrutiny it seems to
melt away under our hands. The situation is indeed a kind of
philosophical tragic-comedy; and is only too indicative of the
baffling whimsicality of the whole system of