me _identical_ world in the case of all separate souls whose
complex vision is thus distorted by the prevalence of that which
opposes itself to creation and by the consequent ebb and
weakening of the energy of love. It is impossible to be assured that
this is the case; but all evidence of language points towards such
an _identity of desolation_ between the innumerable separate
"universes" of the souls which fill the world, when such souls
visualize existence through reason and sensation alone.

This also is a portion of the same "illusion of impersonality" into
which the inert malice of the ultimate "resistance" betrays us with
demonic cunning. What man is there among us who does not
recall some moment of visionary disintegration, when, in the
presence of both these mysteries, an unspeakable depression of
this kind has overtaken him? He has stood, perhaps, on some wet
autumn evening, watching the soulless reflection of a dead moon
in a pond of dead water; while above him the motionless distorted
trunk of some goblinish tree mocks him with its desolate
remoteness from his own life.

At that moment, with his abortive and atrophied complex vision,
all he sees is the eternal soullessness and deadness of matter; dead
moonlight, dead water, dead mud and slime and refuse, dead mist
and vapour, dead earth-mould and dead leaves. And while the
desolate chemistry of nothingness grips him with its dead fingers
and he turns hopelessly to the silent tree-trunk at his side, that also
repels him with the chill breath of psychic remoteness; and it
seems to him that that also is strange and impersonal and
unconscious; that that also is only a blind pre-determined portion
of some huge planetary life-process that has no place for a living
soul, but only a place for automatic impersonal chemistry.
Brooding in this way, with the eternal malice of the system of
things conquering the creative impulse in the depths of his soul, he
becomes obsessed with the idea that not only these isolated
portions of Nature, but the whole of Nature, is thus alien and
remote and thus given up to a desolate and soulless uniformity.
Unutterable loneliness takes possession of him and he feels
himself to be an exile in a dark and hostile assemblage
of elemental forces. If at such a moment by means of some
passionate invocation of the immortal gods, or by means of some
desperate sinking into his own soul and gathering together of the
creative energy in him, he i