e term "objective mystery," therefore, no more than the name
given to that first solid mass of external impression which the
insight of the soul subsequently reduces to the shapes, colours,
scents, sounds, and all the more subtle intimations springing from
the innumerable bodies and souls which fill universal space? No. It
is not quite this. It is a little deeper than this. It is, in fact, the
mind's recognition that _behind_ this first solid mass of external
impression which the soul's own creative activity creates into its
"universe" there must exist "something," some real substance, or
matter, or world-stuff, in contact with which the soul half-creates
and half-discovers the universe which it makes its own.

When, however, the soul has arrived at the knowledge that its own
physical body is the outward expression of its inner self, and when
by an act of faith or imagination it has extended this knowledge to
every other bodily form in its universe, it ceases to be necessary to
use the term "objective mystery"; since that something which the
soul felt conscious of as existing behind the original solid mass of
impressions is now known by the soul to be nothing else than an
incredible number of living personalities, each with its own body.

And just as I make use in this book of the term "objective mystery,"
and then discard it in my final conclusion, so I make an emphatic
and elaborate use of the term "creative" and then discard it, or
considerably modify it, in my final conclusion.

My sequence of thought, in this matter of the soul's "creative"
power, may thus be indicated. In the process of preparing the
ground for those rare moments of illumination wherein we attain the
eternal vision the soul is occupied, and the person attempting to
think is occupied, with what I call "the difficult work of art" of
concentrating its various energies and fusing them into one balanced
point of rhythmic harmony. This effort of contemplative tension is a
"creative effort" similar to that which all artists are compelled to
make. In addition to this aspect of what I call "creation," there also
remains the fact that the individual soul modifies and changes that
first half-real something which I name the objective mystery, until it
becomes all the colours, shapes, sounds and so forth, produced by
the impression upon the soul of all the other personalities brought
into contract with it by the omnipresent personality of the universal
ethe