human soul is to be found in the
unfathomable struggle that goes on in the depths between "the
ideal of evil" which is universal death and "the ideal of love"
which is universal life.

Reason and sensation are used in turn by this abysmal malice of
the soul, to establish and make objective "the idea of nothingness."
Thus reason, driven on by the power of malice, derives exquisite
satisfaction from the theory of the automatism of the will.

The theory of the automatism of the will, the theory that the will is
only an illusive name for a pre-determined congeries of irresistible
motives, is a theory that lends itself to the ideal of universal death.
It is a theory that diminishes, and reduces to a minimum, the
identity of the personal soul. And therefore it is a theory which the
isolated reason, divorced from imagination and instinct, fastens
upon and exults in.

The isolated reason, in league with pure sensation and divorced
from instinct, becomes very quickly a slave of the abysmal
power of malice; and the pleasure which it derives from the
contemplation of a mechanical universe predestined and pre-determined,
a universe out of which the personal soul has been completely
expurgated, is a pleasure derived directly from the power of malice,
exulting in the idea of eternal death.

Philosophers are very crafty in these things; and it is necessary to
discriminate between that genuine passion for reality which
derived from the power of love and that exultant pleasure in a
"frightful" reality which is derived from intellectual sadism and
from the unfathomable malice of the soul.

Between a philosophic pessimism which springs from a genuine
passion for reality and from a pure "pity" for tortured sentient
things, and a philosophic pessimism which springs from a cruel
pleasure in atrocious situations and an ambiguous "pity" for
tortured sentient things there is an eternity of difference.

It needs however something almost like a clairvoyance to
recognize this difference; and such a clairvoyance can only be
obtained when, as in the case of Christ, the soul becomes aware of
its own unfathomable possibilities of good and evil.

A careful and implacable analysis of the two camps of opinion
into which the idea of communism divides the world reveals to us
the fact that the philosophical advocates of private property draw a
certain malignant pleasure from insisting that the possessive
instinct is the strongest instinct in human