thought of as absolutely isolated from all other souls. It is
here, as I have already said, that the peculiarly feminine attribute
of intuition comes to our rescue. The fact that we can
communicate together by human and sub-human language, does
not, though it implies a basic similarity in our complex vision,
really satisfy us.

A strange unhappiness, a vague misery, a burden of unutterable
nostalgia, troubles the loneliness of our soul. And yet it is not, this
vague longing, a mere desire to break the isolating circle of the "I
am I" and to invade, and mingle with, other personalities. It is
something deeper than this, it is a desire to break the isolation of
all personalities, and to enter, in company with all, some larger,
fuller, freer level of life, where what we call "the limits of
personality" are surpassed and transcended.

This underlying misery of the soul is, in fact, a constant
recognition that by the isolated loneliness of our deepest self we
are keeping at a distance something--some unutterable flow of
happiness--which would destroy for us all fears and all weariness,
and would end for ever the obscene and sickening burden of the
commonplace. It is precisely at this point that the intuition comes
to the rescue; supplying our complex vision with that peculiar
"note," or "strain of music," without which the orchestral harmony
must remain incomplete.

In seeking to recall those great moments when the "apex-thought"
of the complex vision revealed to us the secret of things, we find
ourselves remembering how, when in the presence of some
supreme work of art, or of some action of heroic sacrifice, or of
some magical effect of nature, or of some heart-breaking gesture
of tragic emotion in some simple character, we have suddenly
been transported out of the closed circle of our personal life into
something that was at once personal and impersonal. At such a
moment it seems as if we literally "died" to ourself, and became
something "other" than ourself; and yet at the same time "found"
ourself, as we had never "found" ourself before.

What the complex vision seems to reveal to us about this great
human experience is that it is an initiation into an "eternal vision,"
into a "vision of the immortals," into a mood, a temper, a "music
of the spheres," wherein the creative mystery of the emotion of
love finds its consummation. The peculiar opportunity of an
experience of this kind, its temporal "occasion," shall