thers already the moving shadow of
the complex vision, is not a new universe but only an extension
into a further depth of the objective mystery, of the universe which
we already know.

We are not justified in saying of this objective mystery or of this
white screen across which the colours will presently flow, that it is
outside time and space. We are not justified in saying anything at
all about it, except that it exists and that it lends itself to the
advance of the complex vision. If in place of a white screen we
could figure to ourselves this objective mystery as a mass of
impenetrable darkness, we should thus be able to envisage the
complex vision as I have tried to envisage it, namely as a moving
arrow-head of focussed flames with the point of it, or what I have
named the apex-thought of it, illuminating that mass of darkness
with all the colours of life.

But, as I have said, none of these subjective images can serve as
the sort of symbol we are in search of, because by reason of their
being arbitrary and individualistic they lack the organic and
magical associations which cling round such symbols as have
become objective and historical. We can content ourselves with
such fanciful symbols as white screens and arrow-heads and
pyramids of fire in regard to the organ of our research and the
original protoplasmic stuff out of which this organ of research
creates the world; but when it comes to the purpose of life and the
meaning of life, when it comes to that unfathomable duality which
is the essence of life, we require for our symbol something that has
already gathered about it the whole desperate stream of life's tears
and blood and dreams and ecstasies and memories and hopes.

We can find no symbol for the adversary of life, no symbol for the
malignant obscurantism and the sneering malice that resist
creation. To endow this thing which is in the way, this unfathomable
depth of spiritual evil, with the vivid and imaginative life
of a symbolic image would be to change its inherent nature.
No adequate symbol can be found for evil, any more than a
complete embodiment can be found for evil. Directly evil
becomes personal it ceases to be evil, because personality
is the supreme achievement of life. And directly evil is expressed in
a living, objective, historic, mythological image it ceases to be
evil, because such an image instantaneously gathers to itself some
potency of creative energy. Evil is a positive thing