nsfigured by such an
upheaval. For as long as the human will, as we know it now,
remains in association with the aesthetic sense as we know it now,
the creation of the future--however yielding and indetermined--
must depend upon the form, the shape, the principle, the prophecy,
the premonition, existing from the beginning in the nature of
things. And it is precisely this shape, this form, this principle, this
hope, this dream, this essential motive of those sons of the
universe whose existence is implied "when two and three are
gathered together," which would be destroyed and annihilated, if
the complex vision were transformed into something else and a
new world took the place of the old.

It is the existence of these real "immortals" confronting this real
universe which makes possible the feeling we have that in spite of
all our differences, some accumulated stream of beauty, truth and
goodness, does actually carry the past forward into the future, does
actually create the future according to a premonition and a hope
which have been there from the beginning.

This is the supreme act of faith of the complex vision. This is the
supreme act of faith which saves us at once from our subjective
isolation and from the will towards the acceptance of a premature
"religion." This is what saves us from any psychological or
mathematical or logical speculation, which would contradict this
hope or destroy the reality of the universe from which this hope
emerges.

When we come to a general consideration of the various attributes
of the complex vision we are struck at once by the appalling power
they each have, when not held in check, of cancelling one
another's contribution. It is for this reason that my newly-coined
word was unavoidable if we are to emphasize the synthetic energy
of the complex vision when it exercises its control over these
diverse attributes and resists their constant tendency to cancel one
another. It was precisely to emphasize this synthetic energy of
the soul that I have made use of the arbitrary expression
"apex-thought." For if we think of these various attributes as
shooting forth like flames from the arrowhead of the individual soul,
we must think of this coordinating energy as the power which
continually draws these flames together when they deviate from
their focussed intensity, and continually restores, from its
inharmonious dispersion, the concentration of their arrows' point.
If we are permitted