ich the visions of all souls are
miserably subject. They are for ever subject to it because it is
precisely this "illusion" which the unfathomable power hostile to
life for ever evokes.

Nor must we for a moment suppose that this material objectivity,
this pond, these leaves, this mud, this snow, are altogether unreal.
Their reality is demanded by the complex vision and to deny their
reality would be the gesture of madness. They are only unreal,
they are only an "illusion," when they are considered as existing
independently of the "souls" of which they are the "body." As the
expression and manifestation of such "souls" they are entirely real.
They are indeed, in this sense, as real as our own human body.

The human soul, when it suffers from that malignant power which has
its positive and external existence in the soul itself, feels itself
to be absolutely alone in the midst of a dark chaotic welter of
monstrous elemental forces. In a mood of this kind the thought of
the huge volumes of soulless water which we call "oceans" and
"seas" crushes us with a devastating melancholy. The thought of
the interminable deserts of "dead" sand and the vast polar ice
fields and the monstrous excrescences that we call "mountains"
have the same effect. But the supreme example of the kind of
material ghastliness which I am trying to indicate, is, as may easily
be surmised, nothing less than the appalling thought of the
unfathomable spatial gulfs through which our whole stellar system
moves. Here also, in this supreme insistence of objective
"deadness," the situation is relieved when we realize that this
unthinkable space is nothing more than the material expression of
that indefinable "medium" which holds all souls together.

Moreover we must remember that these stellar gulfs cannot be
thought of except as the habitation of innumerable living souls,
each one of which is using this very "space" as the ground of its
creation of the many-coloured impassioned "universe" which is its
own dwelling. In all these instances of "objective deadness,"
whether great or small, we must not forget that the thing which
desolates us and fills us with so intolerable a nostalgia is a thing
only half real, a thing whose full reality depends upon the soul
which contemplates it and upon the soul's implicit assumption that
its truth is the truth of those "invisible companions" who supply us
with our perpetually renewed and reconstituted standard of what is