m of this spectacle is unfixed and wavering.
No psychological or mathematical speculation has the power to
alter the essential outlines of this spectacle.

If such speculations could alter it, then the aesthetic sense of
humanity would be driven to transform itself; and a new aesthetic
sense, adapted to this new "evasiveness of life," would have to
take its place. Attempts are indeed being 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
such attempts by the verdict of the complex vision; a rejection
which indicates that if such attempts are to be successful they must
imply the substitution of a new complex vision for the one which
humanity has used since the beginning.

In other words they must imply a radical change in the basic
attributes of human nature. Humanity, to justify them, must
become some sort of super-humanity; and a new world inhabited
by a new race must take the place of the world we know. Such an
attempt to 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 believe in the inherent unchangeableness of our present instrument
of research--the complex vision as it now exists--can only look on at
these experiments with an attitude of critical detachment; and wait
until time and experience have justified or refuted them.

Philosophers who believe in the unchangeableness of the complex
vision are bound to recognize that the human will, which is a basic
attribute of this vision, must in any case play a considerable part in
the creation of the future. But from their 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 invisible "sons of the universe," the proof of whose
existence is a deduction from the encounters of all actual souls
with one another, would seem to be entirely irreconcilable with
any new complex vision whose nature had been completely
changed.

The visible spectacle of the world with its implied "eternal
arbiters" would be transmuted and tra