nd to be nothing less
than the secret love. And while the great company of the immortal
companions are only known to us by the figure of one among
them, namely by the figure of Christ, this figure alone is sufficient
to contain all that we require of life; for being the embodiment of
love this figure is the embodiment of life, of which love is the
creator and the sustainer.

Thus what the apex-thought of man's complex vision reveals is not
only the existence of the gods but the fact that the vision of the
gods is not broken up and divided but is one and the same; and is
yet for ever growing and deepening. And the only measure of the
vision of the gods which we possess is the figure of Christ; for it
has come about by reason of the anonymous instinct of humanity,
by reason of the compassion of the immortals, and by reason of
the divine insight of Jesus, that the figure of Christ contains within
it every one of those primordial ideas from which and towards
which, in a perpetual advance which is also a perpetual return, the
souls of all living things are for ever journeying.

Whether the souls of men and of beasts, of plants and of planetary
spheres survive in any form after they are dead we know not and
can never know. But this at least the revelation of the complex
vision makes clear, that the secret of the whole process is to be
found in the mystery of love; and to the mystery of love we can, at
the worst, constantly appeal; for the mystery of love has been at
last embodied for us in a living figure over whom Death has no
control.

CHAPTER XI.

THE ILLUSION OF DEAD MATTER

The philosophy of the complex vision is based, as I have shown,
upon nothing less than the whole personality of man become
conscious of itself in the totality of its rhythmic functioning. This
personality, although capable of being analysed in its constituent
elements, is an integral and unfathomable reality. And just because
it is such a reality it descends and expands on every side into
immeasurable depths and immeasurable horizons.

We know nothing as intimately and vividly as we know personality
and every knowledge that we have is either a spiritual or
a material abstraction from this supreme knowledge. This
knowledge of personality which is our ultimate truth, implies a
belief in the integral and real existence of what we call the soul.
And because personality implies the soul and because we have no
ultimate conception of any other re