nfused energies.

The fatal ease with which the whole complex vision gets itself
coloured by and obsessed by one of its own attributes may be
proved by the history of philosophy itself. Individual philosophers
have, over and over again, plunged with furious tenacity into the
mystery of life with a complex vision distorted, deformed and
over-balanced.

I seem to see the complex vision of such thinkers taking some
grotesque shape whereby the apex-point of effective thought is
blunted and broken. The loss and misery, or the yet more ignoble
comfort, of such suppressions of the apex-thought, is however a
personal matter. Those "invisible companions," or immortal
children of the universe, who are implicitly present as the
background of all human discussion, grow constantly more definite
and articulate the apprehension of the general human mind by
reason of these personal aberrations.

It is perhaps rather to the great artists of our race than to any
philosopher at all that these invisible ones reveal themselves, but in
their gradual disclosure to the consciousness of the human race, they
are certainly assisted by the most insane and unbalanced plunges
into mystery, of this and the other abnormal individual. The paradox
may indeed be hazarded that the madder and more abnormal are the
individual's attempts to dig himself into the very nerves and fibres
of reality, the clearer and more definite as far as consciousness of
the race is concerned, does the revelation of these invisible ones
grow.

The abnormal individual whose complex vision is distorted almost
out of human recognition by the predominance of some one
attribute, is yet, in his madness and morbidity, a wonderful engine
of research for the clairvoyance of humanity.

The vision of the immortals, as a background to all further
discussion, is rendered richer and more rhythmical every day, or
rather the hidden rhythm of their being is revealed more clearly
every day, by the eccentricities and maladies, nay! by the insanities
and desperations, of individual victims of life.

Thus it comes about that, while the supreme artists, whose
approximation, to the vision of the invisible ones is closest, remain
our unique masters, the lower crowd of moderately sane and
moderately well-balanced persons are of less value to humanity than
those abnormal and wayward ones whose psychic distortions are the
world's perverted instruments of research.

A philosopher of this unbala