the end of our enquiry also, can be nothing else
than the innumerable company of individual "souls," mortal and
immortal, confronting the mystery of the universe.

The philosophy of the complex vision is not a mechanical
philosophy; it is a creative philosophy. And as such it includes in it
from the beginning a certain element of faith and a certain element
which I can only describe as "the impossible." It may seem
ridiculous to some minds that the conception of the "impossible"
should be introduced into any philosophy at the very start. The
complex vision is, however, essentially creative. The creation of
something really new in the world is regarded by pure reason as
impossible. Therefore the element of "the impossible" must exist in
this philosophy from the very start. The act of faith must also exist
in it; for the imagination is one of the primary aspects of the
complex vision and the act of faith is one of the basic activities of
the imagination.

The complex vision does not regard history as a progressive
predetermined process. It regards history as the projection, by
advance and retreat, of the creative and resistant power of individual
souls. That the "invisible companions" should be in eternal contact
with every living "soul" is a rational impossibility; and yet this
impossibility is what the complex vision, using the faith of its
creative imagination, reveals as the truth.

The imagination working in isolation is able, like reason and
self-consciousness, to fall into curious distortions and aberrations.

One has only to survey the field of dogmatic religion to see how
curiously astray it may be led. It is only by holding fast to the high
rare moments when the apex-thought attains its consummation that
we are able to keep such isolated acts of faith in their place and
prevent the element of the "impossible" becoming the element of the
absurd. The philosophy of the complex vision, though far more
sympathetic to much that is called "materialism" than to much that
is called "idealism," certainly cannot itself be regarded
as materialistic. And it cannot be so regarded because its
central assumption and implication is the concrete basis of
personality which we call the "soul." And the "soul," when we think
of it as something real, must inevitably be associated with what
might be called "the vanishing point of sensation." In other words
the soul must be thought of as having some kind of "matter" or
"energy" or