284 MAN AND THE WORLD. 



the Stress (cp. \ 22) is represented by the material 

 world, and that of the Ego by our present pheno- 

 menal selves. But just as the development of our- 

 selves reveals more and more our full nature, so it 

 must be supposed that the development of the world 

 will reveal more and more fully the nature of God, 

 so that in the course of Evolution, our conception 

 of the interaction between us and the Deity would 

 come to correspond more and more to the reality, 

 until at the completion of the process, the last thin 

 veil would be rent asunder, and the perfected spirits 

 would behold the undimmed splendour of truth in 

 the light of the countenance of God. 



\ 25. But many difficulties remain. Granting 

 that Matter is the product of an interaction between 

 the Deity and the Ego, we have not yet fully 

 accounted for the objective world. The objective 

 world includes not only things but pe^^sons, i.e., 

 spiritual beings. Are these then also subjective 

 hallucinations of each man's Ego ? 



It is not as imperative to deny the ultimate reality 

 of spiritual beings as It was to deny that of unknow- 

 able and lifeless Matter. But it is undeniable that 

 the admission of their reality creates some difficulty. 

 For how can others share in the subjective cosmos 

 arising out of the Interaction between the Deity and 

 the Ego of each of us .^ Metaphysic alone might 

 long have failed to find an answer to this question, 

 and the Idea of a " pre-established harmony " be- 

 tween the phenomenal worlds of several spirits 

 might long have continued to seem a strange flight 

 of fancy, if the progress of science had not enabled 

 us to conceive the process on scientific analogies. 



The problem, in the first place, has much affinity, 

 with what we see in dreams. In a dream also we: 



