amid of fire has a base, there is for ever
some drastic natural law or magical power at work that obscures my
vision whenever I turn my eyes to the place where I know it exists.

I have not mentioned this particular pictorial image with any wish to
lay undue stress upon it. In all rarified and subtle experiments of
thought pictorial images are quite as likely to hinder us in our
groping towards reality as they are to help us. If my image of a
moving, horizontal pyramid with an apex-point of many names
fused into one and a base of impenetrable invisibility seems to any
reader of this passage a ridiculous and arbitrary fancy I would
merely ask such an one to let it go, and to consider my description
of the complex vision quite independently of it.

Sometimes to myself it appears ridiculous; and I only, as we put it,
"throw it out" in order that, if it has the least illuminative value,
such a value should not be quite lost. Any reader who regards my
particular picture as absurd is perfectly at liberty to form his own
pictorial image of what I am endeavouring to make clear. He may, if
he pleases, visualize "the soul" as a sort of darkened planet from
which the attributes of the complex vision radiate to the right or to
the left, as the thing moves through immensity. All I ask is that
these attributes should be thought of as converging to a point and as
finding their "base" in some thing which is felt to exist but cannot
be described.

Probably to a thorough-going empiricist, and certainly to a
thorough-going materialist, it will appear quite unnecessary to
translate the obvious spectacle of the world, with oneself as a
physical body in the centre of it, into mental symbols and pictorial
representations of the above character. Of such an one I would only
ask, in what sort of manner he visualizes, when he thinks of it at all,
the "soul" which he feels conscious of in his own body; and in the
second place how he visualizes the connection between the will, the
instinct, the reason and so forth, which animate his body and endow
it with living purpose? It will be found much easier for critics to
reject the particular image which has commended itself to me as
suggestive of the mystery with which we have to deal, than for them
to drive out and expel from their own thought the insidious human
tendency towards pictorial representation.

I would commend to any sardonic psychologist whose "malice"
leads him to derive pleasure from