h and beauty and goodness which, are the very stuff and
texture of our fate. But these ideas, primordial though they are, are
so confused and distorted by their contact with circumstances and
accident, that it may well be that no clear image of them is found
in the recesses of the soul when the soul turns its glance inward.

No soul, however, can turn its glance inward without recognizing
in its deepest being this ultimate struggle between love and malice.
How then can any philosophy be regarded as a transcript and
reflection of reality when at the very start it refuses to take
cognizance of this fact? If the only knowledge, which is in any
sense certain, is our knowledge of ourselves, and if our knowledge
of ourselves implies our knowledge of a definite "soul-monad" for
ever divided against itself in this abysmal struggle, how then may
a philosophy be regarded as covering the facts of experience,
when in place of this personal contradiction it predicates, as its
explanation of the system of things, some remote, thin, abstract
tendency, such as the "shooting forth of spirit" or the
compounding of states of consciousness?

The whole matter may be thus summed up. The modern tendencies
of thought which we have been considering, get rid of the
old metaphysical notion of the logical Absolute only to
substitute vague psychological "states of consciousness" in its
place. But what philosophy requires if the facts of introspective
experience are to be trusted is neither an Absolute in whose
identity all difference is lost nor a stream of "states of
consciousness" which is suspended, as it were, in a vacuum.

What philosophy requires is the recognition of real actual persons
whose original revelation of the secret of life implies that abysmal
duality of good and evil beyond the margin of which no living soul
has ever passed. Whether or not this concrete "monad" or living
substratum of personality survives the death of the body is quite a
different question; is in fact a question to which the philosophy of
the complex vision can make no definite response. In this matter
all we can say is that those supreme moments of rhythmic ecstasy,
whose musical equilibrium I have indicated in the expression
"apex-thought," establish for us a conclusive certainty as to the
eternal continuance, beyond the scope of all deaths, of that
indestructible aspect of personality we have come to name the
struggle between love and malice.

With the c