apart from
personality the unfathomable duality has no meaning. But in so far
as it represents the eternal struggle between life and death which
goes on all the while in every living soul, the unfathomable duality
is the permanent condition of our deepest knowledge.

It is just here that the mystery of pain and pleasure helps
us to understand the mystery of love and malice, the same
insensitiveness in certain souls that prevents their feeling any vivid
pain or any vivid pleasure, also prevents their feeling any intense
malice. But this insensitiveness which prevents their feeling any
intense malice is, more than anything else, the especial evocation
of the power of malice. For intensity, even in malice, is a proof
that malice has been appropriating to its use the energy of life. The
real opposite of intense love is not intense malice but inert malice.

For malignant inertness is the true adversary of creation. From this
it necessarily follows that the soul which is insensitive to pain and
pleasure and to malice and love is a soul in whom the profound
opposite of love has already won a relative victory. It is certainly
possible, as we have seen, for the victory of malice over love to be
accompanied by thrilling pleasure; but, when this happens malice
has lost something of its "inertness" by drawing to itself and
corrupting for its own use the dynamic energy of love. When
malice displays itself in an intense and vivid activity of destruction
it is less "evil" and less purely "malignant" than when it remains
insensitive and inert. For this reason it is undeniably true that an
insensitive person, although he may cause much less positive pain
than a passionately cruel person, is in reality a more complete
incarnation of the power of "evil" than the latter; for the latter, in
the very violence of his passion, has appropriated to himself
something of the creative energy. It is true that in appropriating
this he has corrupted it, and it is true that by the use of it he can
cause far more immediate pain; but it remains that in himself he is
less purely "evil" than the person whose chief characteristic is a
malignant insensitiveness.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE REALITY OF THE SOUL IN RELATION TO MODERN THOUGHT

It ought not to be forgotten, as at least an important historical fact,
in regard to what we have asserted as the revelation of the
complex vision concerning the reality of the soul, that the two
most influential modern