The average mind, in its vague and careless mood, is ready to accept our contention that some sort of will or reason or consciousness existed at the beginning of things. It is only when such a mind comes to realize that what we are predicating is actual personality, with all the implications of that, that it cries out in protest. The average mind can swallow our contention that reason and will existed from the beginning because the average mind has been penetrated for centuries by vague traditions of an "over-soul" or an universal "reason" or "will." It is only when in our analysis of the attributes of personality we come bolt up against the especially anthropomorphic attribute of "conscience" that it staggers and gasps.
For the original "stellar gas" to be vaguely animated by some obscure "élan vital" seemed natural enough; but for it to be the "body" of some definite living soul seems almost humorous; and for such a living soul to possess the attribute of "conscience," or the power of response to the vision of immortals, seems not only humorous but positively absurd.
The philosophy of the complex vision, however, in its analysis of the eternal elements of personality is not in the least afraid of reaching conclusions which appear "absurd" to the average intelligence. The philosophy of the complex vision accepts the element of the "absurd" or of the "outrageous" or of the "fantastic" in its primordial assumptions; for according to its contention this element of the "apparently impossible" is an essential ingredient in the whole system of things.
Life, according to this philosophy, is only one aspect of personality. Another aspect of personality is the apparently miraculous creation of "something" out of "nothing"; for the unfathomable creative power of personality extends beyond and below all the organic phenomena which we group vaguely together under the name of "life."
Thus when in our analysis of the attributes of the complex vision we are confronted by the evolutionary question as to how such a thing, as the thing we call "conscience," got itself lodged in the little cells of the human cranium, our answer is that the question stated in this manner does not touch the essential problem at all. The essential problem from the point of view of the philosophy of the complex vision is not how "conscience," or why other attribute of the soul, got itself lodged in the human skull, or expressed, shall we say, through the human skull, but how it is that the whole stream of sense-impressions, of which the hardness and thickness of the human skull is only one impression among many, and the original "star-dust" or "star-nebulae" only another impression among many, ever got itself unified and synthesized into the form of "impression" at all.