The philosophy of the complex vision is compelled by the very nature of its organ of research to choose, in this dilemma, the latter rather than the former. And the universe which it thus dares to predicate is at least a universe that lends itself, as so many "scientific" universes do not, to that synthetic activity of the _imaginative reason_ which in the long run alone satisfies the soul. And such a universe satisfies the soul, as these others cannot, because it reflects, in its objective spectacle of things, the profoundest interior consciousness of the actual living self which the soul in its deepest moments of introspection is able to grasp. Modern science, under the rhetorical spell of this talismanic word "evolution," seems to imply that it can explain the multiform shapes and appearances of organic life by deducing them, in all their vivid heterogeneity, from some hypothetical monistic substance which it boldly endows with the mysterious energy called the "life-force" and which it then permits to project out of itself, by some sort of automatic volition, the whole long historic procession of living organisms. This purely imaginative assumption gives it, in the popular mind, a sort of vague right to make the astounding claim that it has "explained" the origin of things. Little further arrogance is needed to give it, in the popular mind, the still more astounding right to claim that it has indicated not only the nature of the "beginning" of things but the nature of their "end" also; this "end" being nothing less than some purely hypothetical "equilibrium" when the movement of "advance," coming full circle, rounds itself off into the movement of "reversion." The philosophy of the complex vision makes no claim to deal either with the beginning of things or with the end of things. It recognizes that "beginnings" and "ends" are not things with which we can intelligibly deal; are, on the contrary, things which are completely unthinkable. What we actually see, feel, divine, imagine, love, hate, detest, desire, dream, create and destroy--these living, dying, struggling, relaxing, advancing and retreating things--this space, this ether, these stars and suns, these animals, fishes, birds, plants, this earth and moon, these men and these trees and flowers, these high and unchanging eternal ideas of the beautiful and the good, these transitory perishing mortal lives and these dimly discerned immortal figures that we name "gods," all these, as far as we are concerned, have for ever existed, all these, as far as we are concerned, must for ever exist.