seems to hold no secret. If some sort of
relief does not come, such relief for instance as physical sleep, the
inert misery of the submission of the will, following upon such a
desperate struggle, may easily drift into a deadly apathy, may
easily approach the borders of insanity.

But there is another condition under which the soul may confront
"the illusion of dead matter." This condition comes about when the
will, instead of being turned towards creation, is definitely turned
towards the opposite of creation. It is impossible for the will to
remain in this condition for more than a limited time. Some
outward or inward shock, some drastic swing of the psychic
pendulum, must sooner or later restore the balance and bring the
will back to that wavering and indecisive state--poised like the
point of a compass between the two extremes--which seems to be
its normal attitude.

Any human will unchangeably directed towards "the good" would
be the will of a soul that in its inherent depths were already
"absolutely good"; and this, as we have seen, is an impossible
phenomenon. The utmost reach of "wickedness" that any soul,
whether it be the soul of a man or of a god, can attain to, is a
recurrent concentration of the will upon evil and a recurrent
overcoming, for relatively increasing spaces of time, of the power
of love. This incomplete and constantly interrupted concentration
upon evil is the nearest approach to "the worship of Satan" which
any will is able to reach. The exquisite pleasure, therefore,
culminating in a kind of insane ecstasy, which the soul can enjoy
when, in the passion of its evil will, it leaps to welcome "the
illusion of dead matter," is a pleasure that in the nature of things
cannot last. And the condition of inert malignant apathy which
follows such an "ecstasy of evil" is perhaps the nearest approach to
a consciousness of "eternal death" which the soul can know.

And it is in this malignant apathy, rather than in the demonic
exultation of the mood that preceded it, that the extreme opposite
of love finds its culmination. For in its hour of demonic exultation,
when the will to evil buries itself with insane joy in "the illusion of
dead matter," it is drawing savagely upon the energy of life. It
corrupts such energy as it draws upon it and distorts it from its
natural functions; but the energy itself, although "possessed" by
the abysmal malice, is living and intense; and therefore cannot be
regarded a