pearance of
all the bodies of all the souls in the world _before_ the creative act
of our own particular soul has visualized such a spectacle. We can
never see the objective mystery as _it is_, because directly we
have seen it, that is to say, the appearance of all the adjacent
bodies of all the souls within our reach, it ceases to be the
objective mystery and becomes the universe we know.

The objective mystery is therefore no real thing at all, but only the
potentiality of all real things, before the "real thing" which is our
individual soul comes upon the scene to create the universe. It is
only the potentiality of the "universe" which we have thus named,
only the idea of the general spectacle of such an universe,
_before_ any universe has actually appeared.

And since the final conclusion of our attempt at articulation should
rigorously eliminate from our picture everything that is relatively
unreal, in favour of what is relatively real, it becomes necessary,
now at the end, to eliminate from our vision of reality any
substantial basis for this, "potentiality of all universes," and to
see how our actual universe appears when this thing has been
withdrawn as nothing but an unreal thing. The substantial basis for
what we actually see becomes therefore no mere potential
universe, or objective mystery, but something much more definite
than either of these. The spectacle of Nature, as we behold it,
becomes nothing else than the spectacle of all the living bodies
that compose the universe, each one of them with its corresponding
invisible soul-monad.

The movement of thought to which I have throughout this book
given the name of "the struggle with the objective mystery"
remains the same. In these cases, _names_ are of small account.
But since it is a movement of thought which itself culminates in
the elimination of the "objective mystery," it becomes necessary to
"think through" the stage of thought which this term covered, and
articulate the actual cause of this movement of the mind.

The cause of the spectacle of the universe, as it presents itself to us
in its manifold variety, is the presence of innumerable visible
bodies which are themselves the manifestation of innumerable
invisible souls. Everything that we see and touch and taste and
smell and hear is a portion of some material body, which is the
expression of some spiritual soul.

The universe is an immense congeries of bodies, moved and
sustained by an i