animals, or of planets or
stars, differ in their nature from human souls we can only vaguely
conjecture. But to refuse some degree of consciousness, some
measure of the complex vision, to any living thing, is to be false to
that primordial act of faith into which the original revelation of the
complex vision compels us to plunge.

The inevitableness of this act of faith may be perhaps more vividly
realized when we remember that it includes in its revelation the
objective reality of our own physical body. Our evidence for the
real outward existence of our own body is no surer and no more
secure than our evidence for the outward existence of other
"bodies."

They stand or fall together. If the universe is an illusion then our
own physical body is an illusion also.

And precisely as the "stuff" out of which the universe is made may
be named "energy" or "ether" or "force" or "electricity," rather
than "matter," so also the "stuff" out of which the body is made
may be named by any scientific term we please. The term used is
of no importance as long as the thing represented by it is accepted
as a permanent reality.

We are now able to advance a step further in regard to the
revelation of the complex vision. Granting, as we are compelled to
grant, that the other "souls" in the universe possess, each of them,
its own "vision" of this same universe; and assuming that each
"vision" is so coloured by the individuality of the "visionary" as to
be, in a measure, different from all the rest, it becomes obvious
that in a very important sense there is not only one universe, but
many universes. These many universes, however, are "caused," or
evoked, or created, or discovered, by the encounter of various
individual souls with that one "objective mystery" which confronts
them all.

What a naive confession it is of the limitation of the human mind
that we should be driven, after all our struggles to articulate the
secret of life, to accept, as our final estimate of such a secret just
the mysterious "something" which is the substratum of our own
soul, confronted by that other mysterious "something" which is the
substratum of all possible universes! With the complex vision's
revelation that the objective universe really exists comes the
parallel revelation that time and space really exist. Here, for the
third time, are we faced with critical protests from the isolated
activity of the logical reason.

Metaphysic reduces both time a