For the complex vision reveals to us that what we call "the
universe" is a thing which is for ever coming newly and freshly
into life, for ever being re-born and re-constituted by the interplay
between the individual soul and the "objective mystery." Of the
objective mystery itself, apart from the individual soul, we are able
to say nothing. But since the "universe" is the discovery and
creation of the individual soul, there must be as many different
"universes" as there are living souls.
Our belief in "one universe," whose characteristics are relatively
identical in the case of all the souls which contemplate it, is a
belief which in part results from an original act of faith and in part
results from an implicit appeal to those "invisible companions"
whose concentrated will towards "reality" and "beauty" and
"nobility" offers us our only objective standard of these ideas.
From the ground, therefore, of this trinity of incomprehensible
substances, namely the substance which is the substratum of the
individual soul, the substance which is "the objective mystery" out
of which the individual soul creates its universe, and the substance
which is the "medium" or "link" which enables these individual
souls to communicate with one another, emerge the only realities
which we can know. And since this trinity of incomprehensible
substances, thus divided one from another, must be thought of as
dominated by the same unity of time and space, it is inconceivable
that they should be anything else than three aspects of one and the
same incomprehensible substance. From this it follows that from
the ground of one incomprehensible substance which in its first
aspect is the substratum of the soul, in its second aspect is the
objective mystery confronting the soul, in its third aspect is the
medium which holds all souls together, there must be evoked all
the reality which we can conceive.
And this reality must, from the conclusions we have already
reached, take two forms. It must take the form of a plurality of
subjective "universes" answering to the plurality of living souls.
And it must take the form of one objective "universe," answering
to the objective standard of truth, beauty, and nobility, together
with the opposites of these, which is implied in the tacit appeal of
all individual souls to their "invisible companions."
In this double reality; the reality of one objective universe
identical in its appearance to all souls but dependent for its identity
upon an implicit reference to the "invisible companions," and the
reality of as many subjective universes as there are living souls; in
this double reality there is obviously no place at all for that
phantom-world of unconscious "matter," which in the form of
soulless elements, or soulless organic automata, fills the human
mind with such devastating melancholy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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