victory over hideousness. Goodness is known to us as a relative
victory over evil. Truth is known to us as a relative victory over
the false and the unreal. The fact that each of these ideas can only
be known in a condition of conflict with its opposite and in a
condition of relative victory over its opposite is due to the fact that
all three of them are in their own nature only clarifying, selecting,
and value-giving activities; whereas the actual material upon
which they have to work, as well as the energy from which they
derive their motive-power, is nothing else but that mysterious
outflowing of the soul itself which we call emotion.

For since emotion is eternally divided against itself into love and
malice, the three primordial ideas which deal this emotion are also
eternally divided against themselves, into beauty and hideousness,
into goodness and evil, into reality and unreality. And since the
very existence of emotion depends upon the struggle between love
and malice, in the same way the very existence of our aesthetic
sense depends upon the struggle between beauty and hideousness;
and the very existence of reason depends upon the struggle
between reality and unreality. The only love we can possibly have
to deal with is a love which is for ever overcoming malice. The
only beauty we can possibly have to deal with is a beauty which is
for ever overcoming hideousness.

And the same assertion must be made both with regard to
goodness and with regard to truth. If any one of them absolutely
overcame the other, so as completely to destroy it, the ebb and
flow of life would at that moment cease.

A world where all minds could apprehend all truth without any
illusion or admixture of unreality, would not be a world at all, as
we know the world. It would be the colourless dream of an
immobile plurality of absolutes. As far as we are concerned it
would be synonymous with death. Thus the ultimate nature of the
world is found to be unfathomably dualistic. A sharp dividing line
of irreconcilable duality intersects every living soul; and the secret
of life turns out to be the relatively victorious struggle of
personality with the thing that in itself resists its fuller life.

This verdict of the complex vision is in unison with the natural
feeling of ordinary humanity and it is also in unison with the
supreme illuminated moments when we seem to apprehend the
vision of the gods. When once we have apprehended the inheren