irectly the
soul loses the rhythm of its total being, it seems as if it were unwise
to advance upon our road until we have discounted such views and
placed them in their true perspective, as unreal but inevitable
abstractions.

The particular views of life which this recurrent movement of the
logical reason results in, are, first, the reduction of everything to
an infinite stream of pure thought, outside both time and space,
unconscious of itself as in any way personal; and, in the second
place, the reduction of everything to one universal self-conscious
spirit, in whose absolute and infinite being independent of space and
time all separate existences lose themselves and are found to be
illusions.

What I try to make clear in the metaphysical portion of this book is
that these two views of life, while always liable to return upon us
with every renewed movement of the isolated reason, are in truth
unreal projections of man's imperious mind. When we subject them
to an analysis based upon our complete organ of research they show
themselves to be nothing but tyrannous phantoms, abstracted from
the genuine reality of the soul as it exists _within_ space and time.

What I seek to show throughout this book is that the world resolves
itself into an immeasurable number of personalities held together by
the personality of the universal ether and by the unity of one space
and one time. Even of space and time themselves, since the only
thing that really "fills them," so to speak, to the brim, is the
universal ether, it might be said that they are the expression of this
universal ether in its relation to all the objects which it contains.

Thus the conclusion to which I am driven is that the dome of space,
out of which the sun shines by day and the stars by night, contains
no vast gulfs of absolute nothingness into which the soul that hates
life may flee away and be at rest. At the same time the soul that
hates life need not despair. The chances, as we come to estimate
them, for and against the soul's survival after death, seem so
curiously even, that it may easily happen that the extreme longing of
the soul for annihilation may prove in such a balancing of forces the
final deciding stroke. And quite apart from death, I have tried to
show in this book, how in the mere fact of the unfathomable depths
into which all physical bodies as well as all immaterial souls recede
there is an infinite opportunity for any soul to find a way