or in any "stream of thought" without a thinker: but can only
be interpreted in terms of what alone we have an inside
consciousness of, namely in terms of personality itself.

To some temperaments it might seem as though this reduction of
the immense unfathomable universe to a congeries of living
souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human
temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense
demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water,
of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. To such a
temperament it might seem as though to be jostled throughout
eternity by other living souls were to be shut up in an unescapable
prison. And when to this unending population of fellow-denizens
of space we add this doctrine that our deepest ideas of Beauty
remain subjective and ephemeral until they have received the
"imprimatur" of some mysterious superhuman Being or Beings,
such rebellious temperaments as I am speaking of might
conceivably cry aloud for the Psalmist's "wings of a dove."

But the aspect of things which I have just suggested is after all
only a superficial aspect of the situation. Those hollow spaces
of unplumbed darkness, those gulfs filled with primordial
nothingness, those caverns of midnight where the hoary chemistry
of matter swirls and ferments in eternal formlessness; these indeed
_are_ taken away from us. But as I have indicated again and again,
no movement of human logic, no energy of human reason, can
destroy the unfathomableness of Nature. The immense spectacle
of the material universe, with its perpetually receding background
of objective mystery, is a thing that cannot be destroyed. Those
among us who reluct at every human explanation of this panorama
of shadows, are only too easily able to "flee away and be at rest" in
the bottomless gulf they crave.

The fact that man's apex-thought reveals the presence of an
unending procession of living souls, each of whose creative energy
moulds this mystery to its own vision, does not remove the
unfathomableness of the world-stuff whereof they mould it. As we
have already seen, this aboriginal world-stuff, so impenetrable to
all analysis, assumes as far as we are concerned a three-fold form.
It assumes the form of the material element in that fusion of matter
and consciousness which makes up the substance of the soul. It
assumes the form of the universal medium which binds all souls
together. And it assumes the