s able to resist this desolation, how
strange and sudden a shifting of mood occurs! He then, by a bold
movement of imagination, restores the balance of his complex
vision; and in a moment the spectacle is transfigured.

The apparently dead pond takes to itself the lineaments of some
indescribable living soul, of which that particular portion of
elemental being is the outward expression. The apparently dead
moonlight becomes the magical influence of some mysterious
"lunar soul" of which the earth's silent companions is the external
form. The apparently dead mud of the pond's edge becomes a
living portion of that earth-body which is the visible manifestation
of the soul of the earth. The motionless tree-trunk at his side seems
no longer the desolate embodiment of some vague "psychic life"
utterly alien from his own life but reveals to him the immediate
magical presence of a real soul there, whose personality, though
not conscious in the precise manner in which he is conscious, has
yet its own measure of complex vision and is mutely struggling
with the cruel inertness and resistance which blocks the path of the
energy of life. When once, by the bold synthesis of reason and
sensation with those other attributes of the complex vision which
we name instinct, imagination, intuition, and the like, the soul
itself comes to be regarded as the substratum of personal
existence, that desolating separation between humanity and Nature
ceases to baffle us. As long as the substratum of personal life is
regarded as the physical body there must always be this desolating
difference and this remoteness.

For in such a case the stress is inevitably laid upon the
physiological and biological difference between the body of a man
and the body of the earth or the moon or the sun or any plant or
animal. But as soon as the substratum of personal life is regarded
not as the body but as the sour it ceases to be necessary to lay so
merciless a stress upon the difference between man's elaborate
physiological constitution and the simpler chemical constitution of
organic or inorganic objects.

If the complex vision is the vision of the soul, if the soul uses its
bodily sensation as only one among its other instruments of
contact with life, then it is obvious that between the soul of a man
and the soul of a planet or a plant there need be no such appalling
and desolating gulf as that which fills us with such profound
melancholy when we refuse to let