nown depths of such a
person's soul. It is not blind, when, in the energy of the creative
vision, such faults subside and fall away and cease to exist. It is
completely justified in its declaration that what it sees and feels in
such a person is a hidden reservoir of unsatisfied good. It does see
this; it does feel this; because there arises, in answer to its
approach, an upward-flowing wave of its own likeness; because in
such a person's inmost soul love, after all, remains the creative
impulse which is the life of that soul and the very substance of that
soul's personality.

The struggle between the emotion of love and the emotion of
malice goes on perpetually, in the depths of life, below a thousand
shifting masks and disguises. What we call the "universe" is
nothing but a congeries of innumerable "souls," manifested in
innumerable "bodies," each one confronted by the objective
mystery, each one surrounded by an indescribable ethereal
"medium."

What we call the emotion of love is the outflowing of any one of
these souls towards the body and soul of any other, or again, in a
still wider sense, towards all bodies and souls covered by the
unfathomable circle of space.

I will give a concrete example of what I mean. Suppose a man to
be seated in the yard of a house with a few patches of grass in
front of him and the trunk of a solitary tree. The slanting sunshine,
we will suppose, throws the shadows of the leaves of the tree and
the shadows of the grass-blades upon a forlorn piece of trodden
earth-mould or dusty sand which lies at his feet. Something about
the light movement of these shadows and their delicate play upon
the ground thrills him with a sudden thrill; and he finds he "loves"
this barren piece of earth, these grass-blades, and this tree. He does
not only love their outward shape and colour. He loves the "soul"
behind them, the "soul" that makes them what they are. He loves
the "soul" of the grass, the "soul" of the tree, and that dim,
mysterious, far-off "soul" of the planet, of whose "body" this
barren patch of earth is a living portion.

What does this "love" of his actually imply? It implies an
outflowing of the very stuff and substance of his own towards the
thing he loves. It implies, by a mysterious vibration of reciprocity,
an indescribable response to his love from the "soul" of the tree,
the plant, and the earth. Let an animal enter upon the scene, or a
bird, or a windblown butterfly, or a fl