ourselves by the outflowing of love, in all the personalities to which
the procession of time gives birth.

And the way we arrive at this identification of ourselves with all
souls, living or dead or unborn, is by our love for that ideal
symbolized in the figure of Christ in whom this identification has
already been achieved. This, and nothing less than this, is the eternal
vision. For the only "god" among all the arbiters of our destiny, with
whom we are concerned, is Christ. To enter into his secret is to enter
into their secret. To be aware of him is to be aware of everything in
the world, mortality and immortality, the transitory and the eternal.

Life then, as I have struggled to interpret it in this book, seems to
present itself as an unfathomable universe entirely made up of
personalities. What we call inanimate substances are all of them the
bodies, or portions of the bodies, of living personalities. The
immense gulf, popularly made between the animate and the
inanimate, thus turns out to be an unfounded illusion; and the whole
universe reveals itself as an unfathomable series, or congeries, of
living personalities, united by the presence of the omnipresent ether
which fills universal space.

It is of little moment, the particular steps or stages of thought, by
which one mind, among so many, arrives at this final conclusion.
Other minds, following other tracks across the desert, might easily
reach it. The important thing to note is that, once reached, such a
conclusion seems to demand from us a very definite attitude toward
life. For if life, if the universe, is entirely made up of personality,
then our instinctive or acquired attitude toward personality becomes
the path by which we approach truth.

To persons who have not been plunged, luckily or unluckily, in the
troublesome sea of metaphysical phrases, the portions of this book
which will be most tiresome are the portions which deal with those
"half-realities" or logical abstractions of the human reason, when
such reason "works" in isolation from the other attributes of the
soul. Such reason, working in isolation, inevitably produces certain
views of life; and these views of life, although unreal when
compared with the reality produced by the full play of all our
energies, cannot be completely disregarded if our research is to
cover the whole field of humanity's reactions. Since there is always
an irresistible return to these metaphysical views of life d