edicating is actual personality,
with all the implications of that, that it cries out in protest. The
average mind can swallow our contention that reason and will
existed from the beginning because the average mind has been
penetrated for centuries by vague traditions of an "over-soul" or an
universal "reason" or "will." It is only when in our analysis of the
attributes of personality we come bolt up against the especially
anthropomorphic attribute of "conscience" that it staggers and
gasps.

For the original "stellar gas" to be vaguely animated by some
obscure "elan vital" seemed natural enough; but for it to be the
"body" of some definite living soul seems almost humorous; and for
such a living soul to possess the attribute of "conscience," or the
power of response to the vision of immortals, seems not only
humorous but positively absurd.

The philosophy of the complex vision, however, in its analysis of
the eternal elements of personality is not in the least afraid of
reaching conclusions which appear "absurd" to the average
intelligence. The philosophy of the complex vision accepts the
element of the "absurd" or of the "outrageous" or of the "fantastic"
in its primordial assumptions; for according to its contention this
element of the "apparently impossible" is an essential ingredient in
the whole system of things.

Life, according to this philosophy, is only one aspect of personality.
Another aspect of personality is the apparently miraculous creation
of "something" out of "nothing"; for the unfathomable creative
power of personality extends beyond and below all the organic
phenomena which we group vaguely together under the name of
"life."

Thus when in our analysis of the attributes of the complex vision we
are confronted by the evolutionary question as to how such a thing,
as the thing we call "conscience," got itself lodged in the little
cells of the human cranium, our answer is that the question stated in
this manner does not touch the essential problem at all. The essential
problem from the point of view of the philosophy of the complex
vision is not how "conscience," or why other attribute of the soul,
got itself lodged in the human skull, or expressed, shall we say,
through the human skull, but how it is that the whole stream of
sense-impressions, of which the hardness and thickness of the
human skull is only one impression among many, and the original
"star-dust" or "star-nebulae" only another impre