because personality in its concrete living activity is the secret of
the universe. It is this very abstraction of love, isolated from any
person who loves, and projected as an abstract into the void, that
has done so much to undermine religious thought, just as that other
absolute of "pure being" has done so much to undermine
philosophic thought.

Love and malice are unthinkable apart from personality; but
personality divorced from the struggle between love and malice is
something worse than unthinkable. It is something most tragically
thinkable. It is in fact the plain reality of death. A dead body
is a body in which the struggle between love and malice has
completely ceased. A dead planet would be a planet in which the
struggle between love and malice had ceased. We cannot speak of
a "dead soul" because the soul is, according to our original
definition, the very fusion-point and vortex-point where not only
consciousness and energy meet but where love and malice meet
and wage their eternal struggle.

Strictly speaking it is not true to say that the ultimate secret of the
universe is the emotion of love. The emotion of love, just because
it is an _emotion_, is the emotion of a personality. It is personality,
not the emotion of love, which is the secret of the universe, which
is, in fact, the very universe itself. But it is personality considered
in its true concrete life, not as a mere abstraction devoid of all
characteristics, which is this basic thing. And personality thus
considered is, as we have seen, a living battleground of two
ultimate emotions. The complete triumph of love over malice
would mean the extinction of personality and following from this
the extinction of the universe.

Thus what the soul's desire really amounts to, in those rhythmic
moments when its diverse aspects are reduced to harmonious
energy, is not the complete victory of love over malice but only a
relative victory. What it really desires is that malice should still
exist, but that it should exist in subordination to love.

The ideal of the soul therefore in its creative moments is _the
process of the overcoming of malice_, not the completion of this
process. In order to be perpetually overcome by love, malice must
remain existent, must remain "still there." If it ceased to be there,
there would be nothing left for love to overcome; and the ebb and
flow of the universe, its eternal contradictions, would be at an end.
The soul's desire