The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

The revelation of the complex vision which I have thus attempted to indicate will be found identical with the natural conclusions of man in all the ages of his history. The primeval savage, the ancient Greek, the mediaeval saint, the eighteenth century philosopher, the modern psychologist, are all brought together here and are all compelled to confess the same situation.

That we are now living personalities, possessed of soul and body, and surrounded by an unfathomable universe, is a revelation about which all ages and all generations agree, whenever the complex vision is allowed its orchestral harmony. The primeval savage looking up at the sky above him might regard the sun and moon as living gods exercising their influence upon a fixed unmoving earth. In this view of the sun and the moon and the stars such a savage was perfectly within his right, because always along with it even to the most anthropomorphic, there came the vague sense of unfathomableness.

The natural Necessity of the ancient Greeks, the trinitarian God of the mediaeval school-man, the great First Cause of the eighteenth-century deist, the primordial Life-Force of the modern man of science, are all on common ground here in regard to the unfathomableness of the ultimate mystery.

But the revelation of the complex vision saves us from the logical boredom of the word "infinite." The idea of the infinite is merely a tedious mathematical formula, marking the psychological point where the mind finds its stopping-place. All that the complex vision can say about "infinite space" is that it is a real experience, and that we can neither imagine space with an end nor without an end.

The "Infinite" is the name which logic gives to this psychological phenomenon. The fact that the mind stops abruptly and breaks into irreconcilable contradictions when it is confronted with unfathomable space is simply a proof that space without an end is as unimaginable as space with an end. It is no proof that space is merely a subjective category of the human mind. One, thing, however, it is a proof of. It is a proof that the universe can never be satisfactorily explained on any materialistic hypothesis.

The fact that we all of us, at every hour of our common day, are surrounded by this unthinkable thing, space without end, is an eternal reminder that the forms, shapes and events of habitual occurrence, which we are inclined to take so easily for granted, are part of a staggering and inscrutable enigma.

The reality of this thing, actually there, above our heads and under our feet, lodges itself, like an ice cold wedge of annihilating scepticism, right in the heart of any facile explanation. We cannot interpret the world in terms of what we call "matter" when what we call "matter" has these unthinkable horizons. We may take into our hands a pebble or a shell or a grain of sand; and we may feel as though the universe were within our grasp. But when we remember that this little piece of the earth is part of a continuous unity which recedes in every direction, world without end, we are driven to admit that the universe is so little within our grasp that we have to regard it as something which breaks and baffles the mind as soon as the mind tries to take hold of it at all.

The reason does not advance one inch in explaining the universe when it utters the word "evolution" and it does not advance one thousandth part of an inch—indeed it gives up the task altogether—when it informs us that infinite space is a category of the human mind. We must regard it, then, as part of the original revelation of the complex vision, that we are separate personal souls surrounded by an unfathomable mystery whose margins recede into unthinkable remoteness.

The ancient dilemma of the One and the Many obtrudes itself at this point; and we are compelled to ask how the plurality of these separate souls can be reconciled with the unity of which they form a part. That they cannot be regarded as absolutely separate is clear from the fact that they can communicate with one another, not only in human language but in a thousand more direct ways. But granting this communication between them, does the mere existence of myriads of independent personalities, living side by side in a world common to all, justify us in speaking of the original system of things as being pluralistic rather than monistic?

Human language, at any rate, founded on the fact that these separate souls can communicate with one another, seems very reluctant to use any but monistic terms. We say "the system of things," not "the systems of things." And yet it is only by an act of faith that human language makes the grand assumption that the complex vision of all these myriad entities tells the same story.