impressions
which make up the life of a real person upon a real earth.

What we have come to demand is that the centre of gravity in our
interpretation of life should be restored to its natural point of
vantage, namely, to the actual living consciousness of an actual
living human being.

And it is precisely these demands that the philosophy of the
complex vision attempts to satisfy. It seeks to satisfy them by using
as its organ of research the balanced "ensemble" of man's whole
nature. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its "material" the whole
variegated and contradictory mass of feelings and reactions to
feelings, which the natural human being with his superstitions, his
sympathies, his antipathies, his loves and his hates, his surmises, his
irrational intuitions, his hopes and fears, is of necessity bound to
experience as he moves through the world.

It seeks, in fact, to envisage from within and without the confused
hurly-burly of life's drama; and to give to this contradictory and
complicated spectacle the aesthetic rationality or imaginative
inevitableness of a rhythmic work of art.

In this attempt the philosophy of the complex vision is bound to
recognize, and include in its _rational form_, much that remains
mysterious, arbitrary, indetermined, organic, obstinately illogical.
For the illogical is not necessarily the unintelligible, so long as the
reason which we use is that same imaginative and clairvoyant
reason, which, in its higher measure, sustains the vision of the poets
and the artists.

By the use of this fuller, richer, more living, more concrete
instrument of research, the conclusions we arrive at will have in
them more of the magic of Nature, and will be closer to the actual
palpable organic mystery of Life, than either the abstract
conclusions of metaphysic or the cautious, impersonal hypotheses of
experimental physical science.

CHAPTER I.

THE COMPLEX VISION

A philosophy is known by its genuine starting-point. This is also its
final conclusion, often very cunningly concealed. Such a conclusion
may be presented to us as the logical result of a long train of
reasoning, when really it was there all the while as one single vivid
revelation of the complex vision.

Like travellers who have already found, by happy accident, the city
of their desire, many crafty thinkers hasten hurriedly back to the
particular point from which they intend to be regarded as having
started; nor in making