We have seen how surrealism adopted one of esoterism's essential
principles by taking on as a goal the recuperation of the lost powers
that will lead finally to the conquest of the supreme point, how
it brought to light the new techniques of disintegration and automa-
tism that lead to the discovery within human subjectivity of the
presence of secret fissures through which the approach to another
life is revealed. This alone would make of surrealism one of the
most original and most powerful enterprises of our era.

None of this was enough, though, to make surrealism integrally
itself. The spirit which animates it cannot be content with new
philosophical speculation, nor even with a complete change in psy-
chology, even though this might he from the very roots up. Surrealism
can in no way accept to close itself up within the confines of
subjectivity. Its very principle enjoins it to seek an active synthesis
of the subjective and the objective. It is neither idealist nor intel-
lectualist. Although it draws upon the occult, at the same time it
cannot ignore the weight of matter or of social life. Its essential
role is, on the contrary, to bring them into effective confrontation,
to search out the ways by which the most extreme subjectivity and
the most tangible objectivity can communicate.

Breton's experience and thought have never ceased making their
way along the dizzying mountain path between the attraction of the

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