, according to this view, is not a life after death
where malice, shall we say, is completely overcome and "good"
completely triumphant. The soul's desire is that malice, or evil,
should continue to exist; but should continue to exist under the
triumphant hand of love. The desire of the soul, in such ultimate
moments, has nothing to do with the survival of the soul after
death. It has to do with an acceptance of the demand of love. And
what love demands is not that malice should disappear; but that it
should for ever exist, in order that love should for ever
be overcoming it. And the ecstasy of this process, of this
"overcoming," is a thing of single moments, moments which, as
they pass, not only reduce both past and future to an eternal "now"
but annihilate everything else but this eternal "now." This
annihilation of the past does not mean the extinction of memory or
the extinction of hope. It only means that the profoundest of our
memories are "brought over" as it were from the past into the
present. It only means that a formless horizon of immense hope,
indefinite and vague, hovers above the present, to give it
spaciousness and freedom.

The revelation of the complex vision does not therefore answer the
question of the immortality of the soul. What it does is to indicate
the degree of importance of any answer to this question. And this
degree of importance is much smaller than in our less harmonious
moments we are inclined to suppose. At certain complacent
moments the soul finds itself praying for some final assurance of
personal survival. At certain other moments the soul is tempted to
pray for complete annihilation. But at the moments when it is most
entirely itself it neither prays for annihilation nor for immortality.
It does not pray for itself at all. It prays that the will of the gods
may be done. It prays that the power of love in every soul in the
universe may hold the power of malice in subjection.

The soul therefore, revealed as a real substantial living thing by
the complex vision, is not revealed as a thing necessarily exempt
from death, but as a thing whose deepest activity renders it free
from the fear of death.

In considering the nature of the contrast between the philosophy of
the complex vision and the most dominant philosophic tendencies
of the present time it is important to make clear what our attitude
is towards that hypothetical assumption usually known as the
Theory of Evolution.

If