nct from one another. There is something
of each of them in every one of them, and every attempt which
they make to establish themselves in an independent existence is
only an attempt of the soul itself to live a perverted and a
discordant, instead of a natural and a harmonious life.

The rarity and difficulty of that high art which brings all these
orchestral players into harmony is sufficient cause to account for
the scarcity of genuine philosophical thought in this confused
world. The human soul, looking desperately round for some calm
yet passionate light to save its hours from ruinous waste, turns
away in bitter disillusion from the thin dust and the swollen
vapour that are offered it.

Out of the logical laboratories of the abstract reason this thin dust
is offered; and out of the ideal factories of the wish for superficial
comfort this iridescent vapour is poured forth. That burning secret
of life, that lovely and terrible reality for which the soul pines is
not to be found in any mere outward fact or in any mere subjective
intuition.

Such a fact may crumble to pieces and give place to another. Such
an intuition may melt into air under the shock of experience. The
craving of the soul is not satisfied by the discovery that "matter"
resolves itself into "energy," nor is the misery of the heart
assuaged by the theory that time is an attribute of fourth-dimensional
space. The lamentable beating of blood-stained hands upon the
ultimate walls does not cease when we learn that two straight lines
can or cannot meet in infinity; nor does the knowledge that history
is an "ideal evolution" heal the aching of the world-sorrow.

Could we know for certain that the dead were raised up, even that
knowledge would not reduce to silence the bitter cry of the
outraged generations. So poisonous and so deep is the pain of life
that no kind of knowledge, not even the knowledge that annihilation
must at last, sooner or later, end it all, can really heal it.

But truth is not knowledge. Truth is not the recognition of an
external fact. Truth is a creative gesture. It is a ritual, a rhythmic
poise, a balance deliberately sustained between eternal
contradictions. It is the magical touch which reduces to harmony
the quivering vibrations of many opposites. It is the dramatic
movement of a supreme actor at the climax of an unfathomable
drama. It is music resting upon itself; music so exquisite as to
seem like silence, music so passion