historic mystery of that thing which
the human race has come to call "beauty," and that other thing--the
re-creation of this through individual human minds--which we
have come to call "art"--is found, if the complex vision is to be
trusted at all, in the contact of the emotion of love with the
"objective mystery," and its consequent dispersion, as the other
aspects of the soul are brought to bear upon it, into the three
primordial ideas of goodness, beauty, and truth.

The reason why this one particular aspect of the soul which we
call emotion is found to be the synthesis of what is discovered by
all the other aspects of the soul functioning together is that the
nature of emotion differs radically from reason, conscience, will,
imagination, taste, and the rest, in that it is not only a clarifying,
directing and discriminating activity but is also--as none of these
others are--an actual mood, or temper, or state of the soul,
possessing certain definite vibrations of energy and a certain sort
of psychic fluidity or outflowing which seems perpetually to
spring up from an unfathomable depth.

This synthetic role played by emotion in unifying the other
activities of the complex vision and preparing the psychic material
for the final activity of the apex-thought may perhaps be
understood better if we think of emotion as being an actual
outflowing of the soul itself, springing up from unfathomable
depths. Thinking of it in this way we may conceive the actual size
or volume of the "soul monad" to be increased by this centrifugal
expansion.

By such an increase of the soul's volume we do not mean an actual
increase; because the depths of all souls are equally unfathomable
when their recession inwards is considered. By such an increase
we refer to the forth-flowing of the soul as it manifests itself
through the physical body. Thus our theory brings us back, as all
theories must if they are consonant with experience, to the
traditional language of the human race. For in ordinary language
there is nothing strange about the expression "a great soul." Such
an expression simply refers to the volume of the soul's outflowing
through the body. And this outflowing is the fulness, more or less,
of the soul's well-spring of emotion.

A "great soul" is thus a soul whereof the outflowing emotion--on
both sides of its inherent duality--is larger in volume as it
manifests itself through the body than in normal cases; and a
"small soul" i