Here also we are confronted by the metaphorical danger, which is a danger springing from the necessity of thought itself; the necessity under which thought labours of being compelled to use sense-impressions if it is to function at all. But though thought cannot exist as thought without the use of sense-impressions it can at least concentrate its attention upon this primal necessity and be aware of it and cautious of it and hypercritical in its use. It can do more than this. It can throw back, so to speak, the whole weight of the mystery and drive it so rigorously to the ultimate wall, that the materialistic and metaphorical element is reduced to a mere gap or space or lacuna in the mind that only a material element can fill and yet that we cannot imagine being filled by any material element which we are able to define. This is precisely what we have to do with regard to that "vanishing-point of sensation" which is the substratum of the soul. The situation resolves itself into this. The highest, deepest, most precious thing we know or can imagine is _personality_. Personality is and must be our ultimate synthesis, our final ideal, and the origin of all our ideals. Nothing can be conceived more true, more real, more spiritual than personality. All conceptions, qualities, principles, forces, elements, thoughts, ideas, are things which we abstract from personality, and project into the space which surrounds us, as if they could be independent of the personal unity from which they have been taken. We are compelled by the inevitable necessity of thought itself, which cannot escape from the world of sense-impressions, to think of personality as possessing for its "substratum" "something" which gives it concrete reality. This "something" which is utterly indefinable, is the last gesture, so to speak, made by the sense-world before it vanishes away. This "something" which is the substratum of the soul and the thing which gives unity and concreteness to the soul is the thinnest and remotest attenuation of the world of sense-impression. It is far thinner and more remote than the sense-element in our conception of spirit. Why, it may be asked, can we not get rid of this "something" which fills that gap or lacuna in the identity of the soul which can only be thought of in material terms? We cannot get rid of it because directly we attempt to do so we are left with that vague idealistic abstraction upon our hands which we call "thought-in-the-abstract"--or "pure thought" or "pure self-consciousness." But it may be asked--"Why cannot the physical body serve this necessary purpose of giving personality a local and concrete identity?" First--and this is the psychological reason--it cannot do so because our feeling of the soul as "something within" our physical body is an ultimate fact of experience which would then remain as an experience denied and contradicted.