world of supposedly "dead
matter" which is the illusive projection of the abysmal malice.

Thus just as the soul is driven by extreme physical pain to
relinquish its identity and to become "an incarnate sensation," so
the soul is driven by the power of malice to relinquish its
centrifugal force and to become the very mud and slime and
excremental debris which it has endowed with an illusive
soullessness.

The clue to the secret pathology of these moods, to whose brink
reason and sensation have led us and into whose abyss perverted
imagination has plunged us, is therefore to be found in the
unfathomable duality of good and evil. If it seems to the kind of
mind that demands "rational unity" at all costs, even at the cost of
truth to experience, that this duality cannot be left unreconciled,
the answer which the philosophy of the complex vision must
make, is that any reconciliation of such a sort, any reduction to
monistic unity of the eternal adversaries out of whose struggle life
itself springs, would bring life itself back to nothingness.

The argument that because, in the eternal process of destruction
and creation, life or love or what we call "the good" depends for
its activity upon death or malice or what we call "evil," these
opposites are one and the same, is shown to be utterly false when
one thinks of the analogy of the struggle between the sexes.
Because the activity of the male depends upon the existence of the
female, that is no reason for concluding that the male and the
female are one and the same thing.

Because "good" becomes more "good" out of its conflict with
"evil," that does not mean that "good" is responsible for the
existence of "evil"; any more than because "evil" becomes more
"evil" out of its conflict with "good" does it mean that "evil" is
responsible for the existence of "good." Neither is responsible for
the existence of the other. They are both positive and real and they
are both eternal. They are both unfathomable elements in every
personal individual soul, whether of man or plant or animal or god
or demi-god that has ever existed or will ever come to exist.

The prevalent idea that because good "in the long run" and over
vast spaces of time shows itself to be a little--just a little--more
powerful than evil, evil must be regarded as only a form of good
or a necessary negation of good is a fallacy derived from the
illusion that life is the creation of a "parent" of the universe whose