The Complex Vision | Page 3

the universe according to
their influence.
Personality is the only permanent thing in life; and if truth, beauty,
goodness, and love, are to have permanence they must depend for their
permanence not upon some imaginary law in a universe half-created by
personality but upon the indestructible nature of personality itself.
The human soul is aware of an invisible standard of beauty. To this
invisible standard it is compelled to make an unconscious appeal in all
matters of argument and discussion. This standard must therefore be
rooted in a personal super-human vision and we are driven to the
conclusion that some being or beings exist, superior to man, and yet in
communication with man. And since what we see around us is a world
of many human and sub-human personalities, it is, by analogy, a more
natural supposition to suppose that these supernatural beings are many
than that they are one.
What the human soul, therefore, together with all other souls, attains in
its concentrated moments is "an eternal vision" wherein what is mortal
in us merges itself in what is immortal.
But if what we call the universe is a thing made up of all the various
universes of all the various souls in space and time, we are forbidden to
find in this visible material universe, whose "reality" does not become

"really real" until it has received the "hall-mark," so to speak, of the
eternal vision, any sort of medium or link which makes it possible for
these various souls to communicate with one another.
This material universe, thus produced by the concentrated visions of all
the souls entering into the eternal vision, is made up of all the physical
bodies of all such souls, linked together by the medium of universal
ether. But although the bodies which thus occupy different points of
space are linked together by the universal ether, we are not permitted to
find in this elemental ether, the medium which links the innumerable
souls together. And we are not permitted this because in our original
assumption such souls are themselves the half-creators, as well as the
half-discoverers, of that universe whose empty spaces are thus filled.
The material ether which links all bodies together cannot, since it is a
portion of such an universe, be itself the medium from the midst of
which these souls create that universe.
But if, following our method of regarding every material substance in
the world as the body of some sort of soul, we regard this universal
ether as itself the body of an universal or elemental soul, then we are
justified in finding in this elemental omnipresent soul diffused through
space, the very medium we need; out of the midst of which all the souls
which exist project their various universes.
We are thus faced by a universe which is the half-creation and
half-discovery of all living souls, a universe the truth and beauty of
which depend upon the eternal vision, a universe whose material
substance is entirely composed of the actual physical bodies of those
very souls whose vision half-creates and half-discovers it.
We thus reach our conclusion that there is nothing in the world except
personality. The material universe is entirely made up of personal
bodies united by the personal body of the elemental ether. What we
name the universe, therefore, is an enormous group of bodies joined
together by the body of the ether; such bodies being the physical
expression of a corresponding group of innumerable souls joined
together by the soul of the ether.

In the portions of this book which deal with the creative energy of the
soul I have constantly used the expression "objective mystery"; but in
my concluding chapter I have rejected and eliminated this word as a
mere step or stage in human thought which does not correspond to any
final reality. When I use the term "objective mystery" I am referring to
the original movement of the individual mind when it first stretches out
to what is outside itself. What is outside itself consists in reality of
nothing but an unfathomable group of bodies and souls joined together
by the body and soul of the ether which fills space.
But since, in its first stretching out towards these things, all it is aware
of is the presence of a plastic something which lends itself, under the
universal curve of space, to the moulding and shaping and colouring of
its creative vision, it is natural enough to look about for a name by
which we can indicate this original "clay" or "matter" or "world-stuff"
out of which the individual soul creates its vision of an universe. And
the name "objective mystery" is the name by which, in the bulk of this
book, I have indicated this mysterious world-stuff, by which the soul