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 finds itself surrounded, both in regard
to the matter of its own body and in regard to the still more alien
matter of which all other bodies are composed.

But when by the use of the term objective mystery I have indicated
that general and universal something, not itself, by which the soul is
confronted, that something which, like a white screen, or a thick
mass of darkness, waits the moving lamp of the soul to give it light
and colour, it becomes clear that the name itself does not cover any
actual reality other than the actual reality of all the bodies in the
world joined together by the universal ether.

Is th