the realm of material substance. We are in fact,
in this case, dealing with something which we feel to be the
integral and ultimate reality of ourselves, as we certainly do not
feel the little cells of the brain to be; and we are dealing with
something that is no mere stream of impressions, but is the
concrete permanent reality which gives to all impressions, whether
material or immaterial, their unity and coherence.

When once we are put into possession of this, when once we come
to recognize our invisible soul as the reality which is our true self,
it is found to be no longer ridiculous and arbitrary to endow this
soul with all those various attributes, which, after all, are only
various aspects of that unique personality which is the personality
of the soul. To say "the soul has imagination," or "the soul has
instinct," or "the soul has an aesthetic sense," has only a ridiculous
sound when under the pressure of the abysmal malice which
opposes itself to life we fall into the habits of permitting those
usurping accomplices, pure reason and pure sensation, to destroy
the rhythmic harmony of the complex vision.

When once we are in full possession of our own soul it is no mere
fanciful speculation but an inevitable act of faith which compels us
to envisage the universe as a thing crowded with invisible souls,
who in some degree or other resemble our own. If this is
"anthropomorphism," though strictly speaking it ought to be
called "pan-psychism," then it is impossible for us to be
too anthropomorphic. For in this way we are doing the only
philosophical thing we have a right to do--namely, interpreting the
less known in the terms of the more known.

When we seek to interpret the soul, which we vividly know, in
terms of chemical or spiritual abstractions of which we have no
direct knowledge but which are merely rationalized symbols, we
are proceeding in an illegitimate and unphilosophical manner to
interpret the more known in terms of the less known, which is in
the true sense ridiculous.

The only escape from that profound melancholy so easily engulfed
in sheer insanity, which is the result of submission to "the illusion
of dead matter," lies in this tenacious hold upon the concrete
identity of the soul. So closely are we linked, by reason of the
chemistry of our mortal body, to every material-element; that it is
only too easy for us to merge our personal life by a perverted use
of the imagination in that phantom-