ickering flight of midges or
gnats, their small bodies illumined by the sun. These new comers
he also loves; and is obscurely conscious that between their
"souls" and his own there vibrates a strange reciprocity. Let a
human being enter, familiar or unfamiliar, and if his will be set
upon "love," the same phenomenon will repeat itself, only with a
more conscious interchange.

But what of "malice" all this time? Well! It is not difficult to
indicate what "malice" will seek to do. Malice will seek to find its
account in some physical or mental annoyance produced in us by
each of these living things. This annoyance, this jerk or jolt to our
physical or mental well-being, will be what to ourselves we name
the "fault" of the offending object.

The shadows will tease us by their incessant movement. The tree
will vex us by the swaying of its branches. The grass will present
itself to us as an untidy intruder. The barren patch of earth will fill
us with a profound depression owing to its desolate lack of life and
beauty. The dog will worry us by its fuss, its solicitation, its desire
to be petted. The gnats or midges will stir in us an indignant
hostility; since their tribe have been known to poison the blood of
man. The human invader, above all; how loud and unpleasing his
voice is! The eternal malice in the depths of our soul pounces upon
this tendency of grass to be "a common weed," of gnats to bite, of
dogs to bark, of shadows to flicker, of a man to have an evil
temper, of a woman to have an atrocious shrewishness, or an
appalling sluttishness; and out of these annoyances or "faults" it
feeds its desire; it satisfies its necrophilistic lust; and it rouses
in the grass, in the earth, in the tree, in the dog, in the human
intruder, strange and mysterious vibrations of response which add
to the general poison of the world. But the example I have selected
of the activity of emotion may be carried further than this. All
these individual "souls" of human, animal, vegetable, planetary
embodiment, are confronted by the same objective mystery and
surrounded by the same ethereal "medium."

By projecting a vision poisoned by malice into the matrix of the
objective mystery, the resultant "universe" becomes itself a
poisoned thing, a thing penetrated by the spirit of evil. It is
because the universe is always penetrated by the malice of the
various visions whose "universe" it is, that we suffer so cruelly
from its ironic "diableri