The Complex Vision | Page 7

a Bergson or a William James there is an almost more
hopeless revulsion. For in these pseudo-scientific,
pseudo-psychological methods of thought something most profoundly
human seems to us to be completely neglected. I refer to the high and
passionate imperatives of the heroic, desperate, treasonable heart of
man.
What we have come to demand is some intelligible system of
imaginative reason which shall answer the exigencies not only of our
more normal moods but of those moods into which we are thrown by
the pressure upon us--apparently from outside the mechanical sequence
of cause and effect--of certain mysterious Powers in the background of
our experience, such as hitherto have only found symbolic and
representative expression in the ritual of Art and Religion.
What we have come to demand is some flexible, malleable, rhythmic
system which shall give an imaginative and yet a rational form to the
sum total of those manifold and intricate impressions which make up
the life of a real person upon a real earth.
What we have come to demand is that the centre of gravity in our
interpretation of life should be restored to its natural point of vantage,
namely, to the actual living consciousness of an actual living human
being.
And it is precisely these demands that the philosophy of the complex
vision attempts to satisfy. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its organ
of research the balanced "ensemble" of man's whole nature. It seeks to
satisfy them by using as its "material" the whole variegated and
contradictory mass of feelings and reactions to feelings, which the
natural human being with his superstitions, his sympathies, his
antipathies, his loves and his hates, his surmises, his irrational
intuitions, his hopes and fears, is of necessity bound to experience as he
moves through the world.
It seeks, in fact, to envisage from within and without the confused
hurly-burly of life's drama; and to give to this contradictory and

complicated spectacle the aesthetic rationality or imaginative
inevitableness of a rhythmic work of art.
In this attempt the philosophy of the complex vision is bound to
recognize, and include in its rational form, much that remains
mysterious, arbitrary, indetermined, organic, obstinately illogical. For
the illogical is not necessarily the unintelligible, so long as the reason
which we use is that same imaginative and clairvoyant reason, which,
in its higher measure, sustains the vision of the poets and the artists.
By the use of this fuller, richer, more living, more concrete instrument
of research, the conclusions we arrive at will have in them more of the
magic of Nature, and will be closer to the actual palpable organic
mystery of Life, than either the abstract conclusions of metaphysic or
the cautious, impersonal hypotheses of experimental physical science.
CHAPTER I.
THE COMPLEX VISION
A philosophy is known by its genuine starting-point. This is also its
final conclusion, often very cunningly concealed. Such a conclusion
may be presented to us as the logical result of a long train of reasoning,
when really it was there all the while as one single vivid revelation of
the complex vision.
Like travellers who have already found, by happy accident, the city of
their desire, many crafty thinkers hasten hurriedly back to the particular
point from which they intend to be regarded as having started; nor in
making this secret journey are they forgetful to erase their footsteps
from the sand, so that when they publicly set forth it shall appear to
those who follow them that they are guided not by previous knowledge
of the way but by the inevitable necessity of pure reason.
I also, like the rest, must begin with what will turn out to be the end;
but unlike many I shall openly indicate this fact and not attempt to
conceal it.

My starting-point is nothing less than what I call the original revelation
of man's complex vision; and I regard this original revelation as
something which is arrived at by the use of a certain synthetic activity
of all the attributes of this vision. And this synthetic activity of the
complex vision I call its apex-thought.
This revelation is of a peculiar nature, which must be grasped, at least
in its general outlines, before we can advance a step further upon that
journey which is also a return.
It might be maintained that before attempting to philosophize upon life,
the question should be asked . . . "why philosophize at all?" And
again . . . "what are the motive-forces which drive us into this process
which we call philosophizing?"
To philosophize is to articulate and express our personal reaction to the
mystery which we call life, both with regard to the nature of that
mystery and with regard to its meaning and purpose.
My answer to the question "Why do