plex vision really does is to take
life just as it is--the ordinary multifarious spectacle presented to
our senses and interpreted by our imagination--and regard this, and
nothing more recondite than this, as the ultimate Absolute, or as
near an Absolute as we are ever likely to get.

From our point of view it seems quite uncalled for to summon up
vague and remote entities, like streams of consciousness and
shootings forth of spirit, in order to interpret this immediate
spectacle. Such streams of consciousness and shootings forth of
spirit seem to us just as much abstractions and just as much
conceptual substitutions for reality as do the old-fashioned
metaphysical entities of "being" and "becoming."

No one has ever _seen_ a life-stream or a life-force. No one has
ever _seen_ a compounded congeries of conscious states. But
every one of us has seen a living human soul looking out of a
living human body; and most of us have seen a living soul looking
out of the mysterious countenance of earth, water, air and fire.

The philosophy of the soul-monad has at any rate this advantage
over every other: namely, that it definitely represents human
experience and can always be verified by human experience. Any
human being can try the experiment of sinking into the depths of
his own identity. Let the reader of this passage try such an
experiment here and now; and let him, in the light of what he
finds, decide this question. Does he find himself flowing
mysteriously forth, along some indescribable "durational" stream,
and, as he flows, feeling himself to be that stream? Or does he feel
himself to be a definite concrete actual "I am I," "the guest and
companion of his body" and, as far as the mortal weakness of flesh
allows, the motive-principle of that body?

If the philosophy of the complex vision is able to make an appeal
of this kind with a certain degree of assurance as to the answer, it
is able to make a yet more convincing appeal, when--the soul's
existence once admitted--it becomes a question as to that soul's
inherent quality. No human being, unless in the grasp of some
megalomania of virtue, can deny the existence, in the depths of his
nature, of a struggle between the emotion of love and the emotion
of malice.

Out of this ultimate duality under the pressure of the forms and
shapes of life and the reaction against these of the imagination and
the aesthetic sense, spring into existence those primordial ideas of
trut