The apparently dead pond takes to itself the lineaments of some indescribable living soul, of which that particular portion of elemental being is the outward expression. The apparently dead moonlight becomes the magical influence of some mysterious "lunar soul" of which the earth's silent companions is the external form. The apparently dead mud of the pond's edge becomes a living portion of that earth-body which is the visible manifestation of the soul of the earth. The motionless tree-trunk at his side seems no longer the desolate embodiment of some vague "psychic life" utterly alien from his own life but reveals to him the immediate magical presence of a real soul there, whose personality, though not conscious in the precise manner in which he is conscious, has yet its own measure of complex vision and is mutely struggling with the cruel inertness and resistance which blocks the path of the energy of life. When once, by the bold synthesis of reason and sensation with those other attributes of the complex vision which we name instinct, imagination, intuition, and the like, the soul itself comes to be regarded as the substratum of personal existence, that desolating separation between humanity and Nature ceases to baffle us. As long as the substratum of personal life is regarded as the physical body there must always be this desolating difference and this remoteness. For in such a case the stress is inevitably laid upon the physiological and biological difference between the body of a man and the body of the earth or the moon or the sun or any plant or animal. But as soon as the substratum of personal life is regarded not as the body but as the sour it ceases to be necessary to lay so merciless a stress upon the difference between man's elaborate physiological constitution and the simpler chemical constitution of organic or inorganic objects. If the complex vision is the vision of the soul, if the soul uses its bodily sensation as only one among its other instruments of contact with life, then it is obvious that between the soul of a man and the soul of a planet or a plant there need be no such appalling and desolating gulf as that which fills us with such profound melancholy when we refuse to let the complex vision have its complete rhythmic play and insist on sacrificing the revelations made by instinct and intuition to the falsifying conclusions of reason and sensation, energizing in arbitrary solitude. The "mort-main" or "dead-hand" of that aboriginal malice which resists life is directly responsible for this illusion of "unconscious matter" through the midst of which we grope like outlawed exiles. Reason and the bodily senses, conspiring together, are perpetually tempting us to believe in the reality of this desolate phantom-world of blind material elements; but the unreality of this corpse-life becomes evident directly we consider the revelation of the complex vision.