What is required is some philosophic system which is bold enough to include the element of so-called "superstition" and at the same time contradicts neither reason nor the aesthetic sense. Such a system, we contend, is supplied by the philosophy of the complex vision; a philosophy which, while remaining frankly anthropomorphic and mythological, does not, in any narrow or impudent or complacent manner, slur over the bitter ironies of this cruel world, or love the clear outlines of all drastic issues in a vague, unintelligible, unaesthetic idealism. What our philosophy insists upon is that the modern tendency to reduce everything to some single monistic "substance," which, by the blind process of "evolution," becomes all this passionate drama that we see, is a tendency utterly false and misleading. For us the universe is a much larger, freer, stranger, deeper, more complicated affair than that. For us the universe contains possibilities of real ghastly, incredible _evil_, descending into spiritual depths, before which the normal mind may well shudder and turn dismayed away. For us the universe contains possibilities of divine, magical, miraculous _good_, ascending into spiritual heights and associating itself with immortal super-human beings, before which the mind of the merely logical intelligence may well pause, baffled, puzzled, and obscurely indignant. The "fulcrum" upon which the whole issue depends, the "pivot" upon which it turns, is the existence of actual living souls filling the immense spaces of nature. If there is no "soul" in any living thing, then our whole system crumbles to pieces. If there are living "souls" in every living thing, then the universe, as revealed by the complex vision, is more real than the universe as revealed by the chief exponents of modern thought. CHAPTER XIV. THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM The philosophy of the complex vision inevitably issues, when it is applied to political and economic conditions, in the idea of communism. The idea of communism is inherent in it from the beginning; and in communism, and in communism alone, does it find its objective and external expression. The philosophy of the complex vision reveals, as we have seen, a certain kind of ultimate duality as the secret of life. This ultimate duality remains eternally unreconciled; for it is a duality within the circle of every personal soul; and the fact that every personal soul is surrounded by an incomprehensible substance under the dominion of time and space, does not reconcile these eternal antagonists; because these eternal antagonists are for ever unfathomable, even as the personal soul, of which they are the conflicting conditions, is itself for ever unfathomable.