we say,
seems to be more often supplied by the intuition, than by any other
attribute of the complex vision.

Intuition having this power, it is not surprising that many souls
should misuse and abuse this great gift. The temptation to allow
the intuition to absorb the whole field of consciousness is to
certain natures almost irresistible. And yet, when intuition is
divorced from the other aspects of the rhythm of life, its tendency
towards what might be called "the passion of identity" very easily
lapses into a sort of spiritual sensuality, destructive to the creative
freedom of the soul. Woe to the artist who falls into the quagmire
of unbalanced intuition! It is as if he were drugged with a spiritual
lust.

To escape from self-loathing, to escape from the odious monotony
and the indecent realism of life--what a relief! How desirable to be
confronted no longer by that impassable gulf between one's own
soul and all other living souls! How desirable to cross the abyss
which separates the "something" which is the substance of our
being from the "something" which is the substance of the
"objective mystery"!

And yet, according to the revelation of the complex vision, this
"spiritual ecstasy" is a perversion of the true art of life. The true
art of life finds in "the vision of the immortals," and in "the vision
of the immortals" alone, its real escape from evil. This "passion of
identity," offered us by the vice, by the madness of intuition, is not
in harmony with the great moments of the soul. Its "identity" is but
a gross, mystical, clotted "identity"; and its "heaven" is not the
"heaven" of the Christ.

If the "ecstasy of identity," as the unbalanced attribute of intuition
forces it upon us, were in very truth the purpose of life, how
grotesque a thing life would be! It would then be the purpose of
life to create personality, only in order to drown it in the
impersonal. In other words it would be the purpose of life to create
the "higher" in order that it should lose itself in the lower. At its
very best this "ecstasy of identity" is the expression of what might
be called the "lyrical" element in things. But the secret of life is
not lyrical, as many of the prophets have supposed, but dramatic,
as all the great artists have shown. For the essence of life is
contradiction. And contradiction demands a "for" and an "against,"
a protagonist and an antagonist. What the revelation of the
complex vision discloses is the