econd consideration derived from human experience which
supports this view of the vicarious pain and pleasure experienced
by the gods through the bodies of all organic entities is the
psychological fact of our own attitude towards plants and animals.
Any sensitive person among us will not hesitate to admit that in
watching animals suffer, he has suffered _with_ such animals; or
again, that in watching a branch torn from its trunk, leaving an
open wound out of which the sap oozes, he has suffered _with_
the suffering of the tree. And just as the phenomenon of bodily
obsession by some immortal god may be either "for good" or "for
evil" as our own soul dictates, so the sympathy which we feel for
plants and animals may be either "for good" or "for evil."

And this also applies to the relation between these bodiless
"immortals" and the bodies of all organic planetary life. According
to the revelation of the complex vision, with its emphasis upon the
ultimate duality as the supreme secret of life, both pain and
pleasure are instruments, in the hands of love, for rousing the soul
out of that sleep of death or semi-death which is the abysmal
enemy.

The philosophies which oppose pain to pleasure, and insist upon
the "good" of pain and the "evil" of pleasure, are no less
misleading than the philosophies which oppose flesh to spirit, or
matter to mind, calling the one "good" and the other "evil." Such
philosophies have permitted that basic attribute of the complex
vision which we call conscience to usurp the place occupied, in the
total rhythm, by imagination; with the result of a complete
falsifying of the essential values.

In a question of such deadly import as this, we have, more than
ever, to make our appeal to those rare moments of illumination
which we have attained when the rhythmic intensity of the
arrow-point of thought was most concentrated and piercing. And the
testimony of these moments is given with no uncertain sound. In
the great hours of our life, and I think all human experiences
justify this statement, both pain and pleasure are transcended and
flung into a subordinate and irrelevant place. Something which it
is very difficult to describe, a kind of emotion which resembles
happiness, flows through us; so that pain and pleasure seem to
come and go almost unremarked, like dark and light shadows
flung upon some tremendous water-fall.

What we are compelled to recognize, therefore, is that pain and
pleasure