The second way in which reason, left to itself, has distorted what the complex vision reveals to us about the "I am I," is the scientific or evolutionary way. According to this view which assumes that the objective process of evolution is our only knowable reality, the individual personal "I am I" finds itself resolved into a fatal automatic phenomenon of cause and effect; a phenomenon which has as its "cause" nothing, but the prehistoric chemical movements of "matter" or "energy." The personal self thus considered becomes a momentary vortex in a perpetually changing stream of "states of consciousness" or "ripples of sensation" to each of which vast anterior tides of atavistic forces have contributed their mechanical quota.
The chemical fatality of our nerve-tissues, the psychological fatality of our motive-impulses, leave no space, when they have all been summed up, for any free arbitrary action of an independent self.
And so, just as according to the metaphysical view, the soul disappears in a blur of ideal fatality, according to the scientific view the soul disappears in a nexus of mechanical determinism. As against both these errors, to the complex vision this "soul" within us appears to be something altogether different from the physical body. The experience we have of it, the feeling we have of it, is that it is a definite "something" dwelling "within" the physical body.
This revelation with regard to it is as unmistakable as it is difficult to analyze. That it is here, within us, we feel and know; but as soon as we attempt to subject it to any exact scrutiny it seems to melt away under our hands. The situation is indeed a kind of philosophical tragic-comedy; and is only too indicative of the baffling whimsicality of the whole system of things. Contradiction and paradox at the very basis of life mock our attempt to utter one intelligible word about the thing which is the most real of all things to us.
We are vividly aware of this mysterious personality within us, "the guest and companion of the body," but directly we attempt to lay hold upon the actual substance of it it seems to vanish into thin air. But at least our complex vision, which is _its_ complex vision, reveals to us the fact of its existence; and with its existence once acknowledged, however impossible analysis of it may be, we are able to give a plain and unequivocal denial to all the impersonal conclusions reached by metaphysic and science.