some degree or
other in all its various aspects of energy.

What we call "memory" is nothing more than the plastic consciousness
of personal identity and continuity. And when once the pain
or pleasure of a bodily sensation has been lodged in the
soul, that pain or pleasure becomes an integral portion of the soul's
life, to be worked upon and appropriated for good or evil by the
soul's intrinsic duality.

Thus although the creative energy in the soul, emerging from
fathomless abysses, can enable the soul to endure until death the
most infernal torments, the fact remains that since the attribute of
sensation, which depends entirely upon the existence of the bodily
senses, is one of the soul's basic attributes and has its ground in the
very substratum of the soul, the sensations of pain and pleasure
whether coloured by emotion and imagination or left "pure" in
the clear element of consciousness, are sensations from which the
soul cannot escape.

From this we are forced to conclude that to affirm that the soul can
remain wholly untouched and unaffected by bodily pain or
pleasure is ridiculous. Bodily pain and pleasure are the soul's pain
and pleasure; because the attribute of sensation, through which the
bodily senses feed the soul, is not the body's attribute of sensation
but the soul's attribute of sensation.

To say, therefore, that the soul can "conquer" the body or be
"indifferent" to the body is as ridiculous as to say that the body
can "conquer" the soul or be "indifferent" to the soul. The fact that
the attribute of sensation is a basic attribute of the soul and that
the attribute of sensation is dependent upon the bodily senses must
inevitably imply that the pressure or impact of the bodily senses
descend to the profoundest depths of the soul.

The thing that "conquers" pain in the invincible martyr is love, or
"the energy of creation," in the soul. The abysmal struggle is not
between the soul and the body or between the flesh and the spirit,
but between the power of life and love, in the body and the soul
together, and the power of death or malice, in the body and the
soul together.

What we are compelled to assume with regard to those "sons of
the universe," whose existence affords a basis for the objectivity of
the "ultimate ideas," is that, with them, what I have called "the
eternal idea of the body" takes the place in their complex vision of
our actual physical body. Their complex vision must be rega