s and forms; and he imagines that a
day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of
existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought
from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the
creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It
is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by
consciousness.

May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are
others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as
nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an
infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!

May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be
freed?

_Oh tierras de Alvargonzalez,
en el corazon de Espana,
tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
tan tristes que tienen alma!_

sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the
sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon
them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of
matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the
individual? Is it the tree?

And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at
strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote:

_Aqui, para vivir en santa calma,
o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51]

And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if
you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the
reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to
consciousness?

Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of
Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with
his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ,
the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious
Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld
secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian
mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and
this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or
restitution.

In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be
destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when
he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is
excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things