the complex vision have its
complete rhythmic play and insist on sacrificing the revelations
made by instinct and intuition to the falsifying conclusions of
reason and sensation, energizing in arbitrary solitude.

The "mort-main" or "dead-hand" of that aboriginal malice which
resists life is directly responsible for this illusion of "unconscious
matter" through the midst of which we grope like outlawed
exiles. Reason and the bodily senses, conspiring together, are
perpetually tempting us to believe in the reality of this desolate
phantom-world of blind material elements; but the unreality of this
corpse-life becomes evident directly we consider the revelation of the
complex vision.

For the complex vision reveals to us that what we call "the
universe" is a thing which is for ever coming newly and freshly
into life, for ever being re-born and re-constituted by the interplay
between the individual soul and the "objective mystery." Of the
objective mystery itself, apart from the individual soul, we are able
to say nothing. But since the "universe" is the discovery and
creation of the individual soul, there must be as many different
"universes" as there are living souls.

Our belief in "one universe," whose characteristics are relatively
identical in the case of all the souls which contemplate it, is a
belief which in part results from an original act of faith and in part
results from an implicit appeal to those "invisible companions"
whose concentrated will towards "reality" and "beauty" and
"nobility" offers us our only objective standard of these ideas.
From the ground, therefore, of this trinity of incomprehensible
substances, namely the substance which is the substratum of the
individual soul, the substance which is "the objective mystery" out
of which the individual soul creates its universe, and the substance
which is the "medium" or "link" which enables these individual
souls to communicate with one another, emerge the only realities
which we can know. And since this trinity of incomprehensible
substances, thus divided one from another, must be thought of as
dominated by the same unity of time and space, it is inconceivable
that they should be anything else than three aspects of one and the
same incomprehensible substance. From this it follows that from
the ground of one incomprehensible substance which in its first
aspect is the substratum of the soul, in its second aspect is the
objective mystery confronting