y when the soul's essential part in the creation
of Nature is fully realized that we see how false and exaggerated
an emphasis we are placing upon this "externality" when we
permit it to hinder our recognition of the nearness of the immortal
gods.

The laws which govern the physical body and "the thousand ills
that flesh is heir to" obstruct, confuse, conceal, and distort the soul
and hold the gods at a distance. But although the brain and the
senses may be tortured, atrophied, perverted; and although the soul
may be driven back into its unfathomable depths and held there as
if in prison; and although madness intervene between the soul's
vision and the world, and sleep may fling it into oblivion, and
death may destroy it utterly; tortured or perverted or atrophied or
semi-conscious or unconscious, while the soul _lives_, the
"invisible companions of men" remain nearer to it than any
outward accident, chance, circumstance, fatality or destiny, and
are still the arbiters of its hope.

Retracing once more our steps over this perilous bridge of ultimate
thought, we may thus indicate the situation. Our starting-point
cannot be the "a priori synthetic unity of apperception," because
this is an abstraction of the pure reason, and if accepted as a real
fact would contradict and negate all the other attributes of the soul.

Our starting-point cannot be the universal "monad" of
self-consciousness, because this is an abstraction of the "I am I" and
if accepted as a real fact would negate and suppress every attribute
of the soul except the attributes of self-consciousness and emotion.

Our starting-point cannot be the objective world, considered in its
evolutionary externality, because this external world depends for
its very existence upon the attributes of the soul, especially upon
the attribute of sensation.

Our starting-point can therefore be nothing less than the complex
vision, which on the one hand implies the reality of the soul and
on the other the reality of the external world, and which itself is
the vision of a real concrete personality. The individual is thus
disclosed as something more than the universal, the microcosm as
something more than the macrocosm, and any living personality as
something more than any conceivable absolute being.

By an original act of faith, towards which we are helped by the
soul's attribute of imagination, we are compelled to conceive of
every other soul in the world as being the ce