ll make a general remark on each of these two
points.

First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.

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 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 possible,
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. It 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 appear endued 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 {148} come, no
process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms 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 sometimes high; but almost always
nonlogical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason
back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things
with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young
and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit
bloweth where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface
passively to all the gifts alike, as the st