What is usually called Evolution then, and what may just as reasonably be called Deterioration, is as far as we are concerned just a matter of perpetual movement and change.
The living personalities that fill the circle of space are perpetually reproducing themselves in a series of organic births, and perpetually passing away in the process of death.
We have also to remember that every living organism whether such an organism resemble that of a planet or a human being, is itself the dwelling-place of innumerable other living organisms dependent on it and drawing their life from it, precisely as their parent organism depends on, and draws its life from, the omnipresent universal ether.
What the philosophy of the complex vision denies and refutes is the modern tendency to escape from the real mystery of existence by the use of such vague hypothetical metaphors, all of them really profoundly anthropomorphic, such as "life-force" or "hyper-space" or "magnetic energy" or "streams of sub-consciousness."
The philosophy of the complex vision drives these pseudo-philosophers to the wall and compels them to confess that ultimately all they are aware of is the inner personal activity of their own individual souls; compels them to confess that when it comes to the final analysis their "life-force" and "pure thought" and "hyper-space" and "radio-magnetic activity" are all nothing but one-sided hypothetical abstractions taken from the concrete movements of concrete individual bodies and souls which by an inevitable act of the imagination we assume to reproduce in their interior reactions what we ourselves experience in ours.
To introduce such a conception as that of those mysterious super human beings, whom I have named "the gods," into a serious philosophic system, may well appear to many modern scientific minds the very height of absurdity.
But the whole method of the philosophy of the complex vision is based upon direct human experience; and from my point of view the obscure and problematic existence of some such beings has behind it the whole formidable weight of universal human feeling—a weight which is not made less valid by the arrogant use of mere phrases of rationalistic contempt such as that which is implied in the word "superstition."
From our point of view a philosophy which does not include and subsume and embody that universal human experience covered by the term "superstition" is a philosophy that has eliminated from its consideration one great slice of actual living fact. And it is in this aspect of the problem more than in any other that the philosophy of the complex vision represents a return to certain revelations of human truth—call them mythological if you please—which modern philosophy seems to have deliberately suppressed. In the final result it may well be that we have to choose, as our clue to the mystery of life, either "mathematica" or "mythology."
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.