form of the objective mystery which
confronts the vision of all souls. Over these three forms of the
"world-stuff" hangs irrevocably the great "world-curve" or
"world-circle" of omnipresent Space, which gives the final and
ultimate unity to all possible universes.

The temperamental revolt, however, which I am endeavouring to
describe, against our doctrine of personality, does not stop with a
demand for de-humanized air and space. It has a passionate
"penchant" for the projection of such vague imaginative images as
"spirit" and "life." Forgetful that no man has ever seen or touched
this "spirit," apart from a personal soul, or this "life," apart from
some living thing, the temperament I am thinking of loves to make
imaginative excursions into what it supposes to be vast receding
abysses of pure "spirit" and of impersonal inhuman "life."

It gains thus a sense of liberation from the boundaries of its own
personality and a sense of liberation from the boundaries of all
personality. The doctrine, therefore, that the visible universe
is a mysterious complex of many concentrated mortal visions,
stamped, so to speak, with the "imprimatur" of an ideal immortal
vision, is a doctrine that seems to impede and oppose such a
temperament in this abysmal plunge into the ocean of existence.
But my answer to the protest of this temperament--and it is an
answer that has a certain measure of authority, since this
temperament is no other than my own--is that this feeling of
"imprisonment" is due to a superficial understanding of the
doctrine against which it protests. It is superficial because it does
not recognize that around, above, beneath, within, every form of
personality that the "curve of space" covers, there is present the
aboriginal "world-stuff," unfathomable and inexplicable, out of
which all souls draw the material element of their being, in which
all souls come into contact with one another, and from which all
souls half-create and half-discover their personal universe.

It was necessary to introduce this question of temperamental
reaction just here, because in any conclusion as to the nature of
Beauty it is above all things important to give complete
satisfaction to every great recurrent exigency of human desire.
And this desire for liberation from the bonds of personality is one
of the profoundest instincts of personality.

We have now arrived at a point of vantage from which it is
possible to survey the outlines of o