The Complex Vision

at I have named the soul's "apex-thought" and certain permane

gies of the complex vision are brought into focus and fused with one another. In accordance with my favourite metaphorical imag

he various perplexing human problems round which our controversies smoulder and burn. It is advisable that I should indic

pex-thought" to those recurrent moods of profound human scept

nforeseen experiment of the soul may suddenly endow us. And it is above all advisable that I should show the relation between t

culty. Only at rare moments do we individually approximate to its achievement. Only once or twice, it may be, in a whole life-time, do we actually achieve it

s living human beings, depends on no outward events or circumstances but on our success in the conscious effort of appro

ion for what cannot be easily and fluently expressed. Education is too frequently a mere affair of words, a superficial encouragement of superficial expression. It is for this reason that many totally uneducated persons a

le role played by religion in the history of the human race, nor because I regard the "religious instinct" as a thing outgrown and done with. I have not included it because I can

sionate and calm, at once personal and impersonal, which suffuses our being with an unutterable happiness when the energies of the complex vision are brought into focus. I regard the word religion as a word that has draw

emplates the unknown, is religion. The passionate craving of human

h, a "cause," for the sake of which we can sacrifice our p

, is religion. The desire for an "over-life" or an "over-world," in which the distress, di

desire to force upon others by violence, by trickery, by fire, by sword, by persecution, by magic, by pe

regarding it rather as a name given to the emotional thrill and ecstatic abandonment which accompanies any sort of co-ordinati

en it takes this form it resolves itself into nothing more than an unutterable feeling of ecstasy produced by the sense that we are in harmony with the rest of the universe. Religion, as I am compelled to

at once escape from ourselves and realize ourselves. We are forbidden to speak of the "religious sense" or the "religious instinct" because, truly interpreted, r

In the second instance it is a tragic temptation to rest by the way in a unity which is an illusive unity and in a heaven from which "the sun of the morning" is excluded. It thus comes about that what we call religion is frequently a hindrance to the rhy

modern one, is based upon the theory, handed about in modern literature as a kind of diploma of cleverness and repeated superficially b

mic moments may be, some sort of approximation to them, quite sufficient to destroy the validity of this absolute scepticism, must, if a per

, undulates, advances, recedes, evolves, revolves, explodes, precipitates, lightens, darkens, thins, thickens, hardens, softens, over-brims, concentrates, grows sh

g more than a crafty pathological retreat from the formidable challenge of life. It is indeed a kind of mental drug or spiritual opiate by the use of which many unheroic souls hide themselves from the sardo

timent about "the fluidity of life," is one of the instinctive ways by which we try to pretend that our prison-walls are not walls at all, but only friendly and flowing vapour. None of the great works of art and poetry, the aus

ery the grand outlines of the world remain austerely and sternly the same. The sun rises and sets. The moon draws the tides. Man goes forth to his work and his labour until the evening. Man is born; man loves and hates; man dies. And over him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. And

y." The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Lif

ief object is to strip the world of the dignity of its real tragedy and endow it with the indignity of some pre

ople speak of materialism they are thinking of the austere limits of that vast objective spectacle into which we are all born. This spectacle is indeed mysterious. It is indeed

not see that the only "escape" offered by the reality of things is a change of attitude towards this spectacle, not an assertion that the form of t

eing made at this very hour to "start fresh" with a new aesthetic sense and only the winnowing process of time and the pressure of personal experience can refute such attempts. Meanwhile all we can do is to note the rejection of suc

o substitute a new humanity for the old is already conscious of itself in those curious experiments of psychical research which are based upon the hypothesis that some completely new organs of sense are on the point of being discovered. Philosophers who be

eir point of view the will is, after all, only one of these basic attributes. There is also the aesthetic sense. And the aesthetic sense is totally averse to this new kind of humanity and this new kind of world. The eternal vision of those in

e future-however yielding and indetermined-must depend upon the form, the shape, the principle, the prophecy, the premonition, existing from the beginning in the nature of things. And it is precisely this shape, this form, this principle, this hope, this dream, th

spite of all our differences, some accumulated stream of beauty, truth and goodness, does actually carry the past forward in

isolation and from the will towards the acceptance of a premature "religion." This is what saves us from any psychological or mathem

ists their constant tendency to cancel one another. It was precisely to emphasize this synthetic energy of the soul that I have made use of the arbitrary expression "apex-thought." For if we think of these various attributes as shooting forth like flames from the arrowhead of the individual soul, we must think of this coordinating energy as the power which continually draws these flames together when they dev

e flames recede from one another and are blown backwards is only a symbolic way of indicating how diff

bends them back, I am suggesting that the ultimate reality of things is a state of confused movement continually becoming a state of concentrated movement. I am suggesting that the secrets of life only yield themselves up to a m

the imagination and the intuition, it tends to persuade us to deny the very existence of that deepest and most vivid reality of all, the handle of our spear-head, the base of our pyramid, the mysterious entity within us, which we have come, following the traditions of t

th no concrete reality within it and no concrete reality outs

n it may happen that reason will arbitrarily ally itself with one or the other of the other attributes and on the strength of such an alliance seek to obliterate all the rest. Thus while it is impossible to avoid the admission that of all these basic attributes reason is the most important, because without it all the rest would be inarticulate and dumb, it remains true that to hold reason in balanced relation to al

ll these conflicting attributes at this exquisite point of suspense between abysses of contradiction, is a necessity whic

ngs, reflected in the mirror of the mind. The truth seems to be the very system of things itself, become conscious and volitional, changing, growing, living, destroying, creating. Thus it comes about that the thought which plung

oul. The soul is each of them, not in each of them. They are not "faculties" through which the soul acts. They are never absolutely distinct from one another. There is something of each of them in every one of

scarcity of genuine philosophical thought in this confused world. The human soul, looking desperately round for some calm yet passionate

e wish for superficial comfort this iridescent vapour is poured forth. That burning secret of life, that lovely and te

r" resolves itself into "energy," nor is the misery of the heart assuaged by the theory that time is an attribute of fourth-dimensional space. The lamentable beating of blood-stained hands upon the

bitter cry of the outraged generations. So poisonous and so deep is the pain of life that no kind of knowl

ained between eternal contradictions. It is the magical touch which reduces to harmony the quivering vibrations of many opposites. It is the dramatic movement of a supr

self together at one concentrated point. And this point is the arrow point of our human soul; th

sable to use such metaphorical and pictorial images as the one just indicated, it must be remembered that what we are ac

on all sides by a real unfathomable universe, is the original revelati

n harmonious activity. An acceptance of the reality of the human body is an essential part of this harmonious activity because among the aspects of the complex visi

body also. Flesh and blood must therefore play their part in the resultant harmony at which we are all the while aiming; and no contempt for the b

he bodily senses in its resultant rhythm. It must always be considered as using that portion of the objective universe which we name the body as an inevitable "note" in its mus

t be thought of as being "incarnated," yet since they are living souls, even as we are, and since every living soul has, as the substratum of its identity, what might be called a "spiritual body," there is nothing in the revelation made to us through the act