It is notorious that facts are compatible with
opposite emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different
feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and
there is no rationally deducible (可推论的) connection between any outer fact and
the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another
sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the
subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possibly, suddenly stripped of all the
emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it
exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or
apprehensive comment. Ft will be almost impossible for you to realize such a
condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then
have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and
series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or
perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may
al3 pear endowed with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion
of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it
comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it trans
forms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont
Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world
to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear,
with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes.
And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical,
often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions
put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves
gifts;—gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and some times high; but almost
always non-logical and beyond our control. Gifts, either of the flesh or of the
spirit; and the spirit blows where it lists, and the world’s materials lend
their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives
indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the
optical apparatus in the gallery.
Meanwhile the practically
real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the
compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable
combination. Withdraw or pervert (使错乱) either factor of this complex resultant,
and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues.This passage mainly discusses ______.
