ls.

The distinction we have thus insisted upon between the nature of
emotion and the nature of the other aspects of the soul makes it
now clear how it is that we are compelled to regard these three
primordial ideas of beauty, truth and goodness as finding their
unity and their original identity in the emotion of love.

It has been necessary to consider these ultimate movements of the
soul in order that we may be in a position to understand the
general nature of this mysterious thing we call "art," and be able to
track its river-bed, so to speak, up to the original source. From a
consideration of the fact that the outflowing of the soul takes the
form of emotion, and that this emotion is at perpetual war within
itself and is for ever contradicting itself, we arrive at our first
axiomatic principle with regard to art, namely that art is, and must
always be, penetrated through and through by the spirit of
contradiction. Whatever else art may become, then, one thing we
can predicate for certain with regard to it, namely that it springs
from an eternal conflict between two irreconcilable opposites.

We are, further than this, able to define the nature of these
opposites as the everlasting conflict between creation and what
resists creation, or between love and malice. It is just here, in
regard to the character of these opposites, that the philosophy of
the complex vision differs from the Bergsonian philosophy of the
"elan vital."

According to Bergson's monistic system the only genuine reality is
the flux of spirit The spirit of some primordial self-expansion
projects what we call "matter" as its secondary manifestation and
then is condemned to an unending and exhausting struggle with
what it has projected.

Spirit, therefore, is pure energy and movement and matter is pure
heaviness and resistance. Out of the necessity of this conflict
emerge all those rigid logical concepts and mathematical
formulae, of which space and time, in the ordinary sense of those
words, are the ultimate generalization.

Our criticism of this theory is that both these things--this "spirit"
and this spirit-evoked "matter"--are themselves meaningless
concepts, concepts which, in spite of Bergson's contempt for
ordinary metaphysic, are in reality entirely metaphysical, being in
fact, like the old-fashioned entities whose place they occupy,
nothing but empty bodiless generalizations abstracted from the
concrete living reality of the soul. But