en the mystery of personality and the mystery of what
seems the impersonal. Thus it remains perfectly true that what we
sometimes call "brute matter" possesses an element of malignant
inertness and malicious resistance to the power of creation. This
malice of the impersonal, this malignant inertness of "matter," is
an ultimate fact; and is not less a fact because it depends upon the
existence of the same malice and the same inert resistance in our
own souls.

Nor are we able to escape from the conclusion that this malignant
element in the indefinable "world-stuff" exists independently of
any human soul. It must be thought of as dependent upon the same
duality in the souls of "the sons of the universe" as that which
exists in the souls of men. For although the primordial ideas of
truth and nobility and beauty, brought together by the emotion of
love, are realized in the "gods" with an incredible and immortal
intensity, yet the souls of the "gods" could not be souls at all if
they were not subject to the same duality as that which struggles
within ourselves.

It follows from this that we are forced to recognize the presence of
a potentiality of evil or malice in the souls of "the sons of the
universe." But although we cannot escape from the conclusion that
evil or malice exists in the souls of the immortals as in all human
souls, yet in their souls this evil or malice must be regarded as
perpetually overcome by the energy of the power of love. This
overcoming of malice by the power of love, or of evil by "good,"
in the souls of "the sons of the universe," must not be regarded as
a thing once for all accomplished, but as a thing eternally
re-attained as the result of an unceasing struggle, a struggle so
desperate, so passionate and so unfathomable, that it surpasses all
effort of the mind to realize or comprehend it.

It must not, moreover, be forgotten that what the complex vision
reveals about this eternal struggle between love and malice in the
souls of "the sons of the universe" and in the souls of all living
things, is not that love and malice are vague independent
elemental "forces" which obsess or possess or function _through_
the soul which is their arena, but rather that they themselves _are_
the very stuff and texture and essence of the individual soul itself.

Their duality is unfathomable because the soul is unfathomable.
The struggle between them is unfathomable because the struggle
between them is nothi