the soul, in its third aspect is the
medium which holds all souls together, there must be evoked all
the reality which we can conceive.

And this reality must, from the conclusions we have already
reached, take two forms. It must take the form of a plurality of
subjective "universes" answering to the plurality of living souls.
And it must take the form of one objective "universe," answering
to the objective standard of truth, beauty, and nobility, together
with the opposites of these, which is implied in the tacit appeal of
all individual souls to their "invisible companions."

In this double reality; the reality of one objective universe
identical in its appearance to all souls but dependent for its identity
upon an implicit reference to the "invisible companions," and the
reality of as many subjective universes as there are living souls; in
this double reality there is obviously no place at all for that
phantom-world of unconscious "matter," which in the form of
soulless elements, or soulless organic automata, fills the human
mind with such devastating melancholy.

The dead pond with its dead moonlight, with its dead mud and its
dead snow, is therefore no better than a ghastly illusion when
considered in isolation from the soul or the souls which look forth
from it. To the soul of which those elements are the "body" neither
mud nor water nor rain nor earth-mould can appear desolate or
dead. To the soul which contemplates these things there can be no
other way of regarding them, as long as the rhythm of its vision is
unimpeded, than as the outward manifestation of a personal life, or
of many personal lives, similar in creative energy to its own.

Between the soul, or the souls, of the elements of the earth, and the
soul of the human spectator there must be, if our conclusions are
to be held good at all, a natural and profound reciprocity. The
apparent "deadness," the apparent automatism of "matter," which
projects itself between these two and resists with corpse-like
opacity their reciprocal understanding, must be one of the ghastly
illusions with which the sinister side of the eternal duality
undermines the magic of life.

But although in its objective isolation, as an absolute entity, this
"material deadness" of earth and water and rain and snow and of
all disintegrated organic chemistry must be regarded as an
"illusion," it would be a falsifying of the reality of things to deny
that it is an "illusion" to wh