or standard of
ideas "the vision of the immortal companions." By the term "the
immortal companions" I do not mean to indicate any "immanent"
power or transcendental "over-soul." Nor do I mean to indicate that
they are created by our desire that they should exist. Although I call
them "companions" I wish to suggest that they exist quite
independently of man and are not the origin of these ideas in man's
soul but only the model, the pattern, the supreme realization of these
ideas.

It is, however, to these tacit listeners, whose vision of the world is
there in the background as the arbiter of our subjective encounters,
that in our immense loneliness we find ourselves constantly turning.
All our philosophy, all our struggle with life, falls into two aspects
as we grow more and more aware of what we are doing. The whole
strange drama takes the form, as we feel our way, of a creation
which at present is non-existent and of a realization of something
which at present is hidden.

Thus philosophy, as I have said, is at once a setting-forth and a
return; a setting-forth to something that has never been reached,
because to reach it we have to create it, and a return to something
that has been with us from the beginning and is the very form and
shape and image of the thing which we have set forth to create.

These hidden listeners, these tacit arbiters, these assumed and
implied witnesses of our life, give value to every attempt we make
at arriving at some unity amid our differences; and their vision
seems, as the eternal duality presses upon us, to be at once the thing
from which we start and the thing towards which, moulding the
future as we go, we find ourselves moving. In the unfathomable
depths of the past we are aware of a form, a shape, a principle, a
premonition; and into the unfathomable depths of the future we
project the fulfilled reality of this. We are as gods creating
something out of nothing. But when we have created it . . . behold!
it was there from the beginning; and the nothing out of which we
have created it has receded into a second future from which it mocks
and menaces us again.

The full significance of this ultimate duality would be rendered
abortive if the future were determined in any more definite way than
by the premonition, the hope, the dream, the passion, the prophecy,
the vision, of those invisible companions whose existence is implied
whenever two separate souls communicate their thoughts to