age-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
either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we
call pathological ensues.

In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for
a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole
expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of
conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not
infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a
transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems
to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar
change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks
remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is
cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with. "It is as if
I lived in another century," says one asylum patient.--"I see
everything through a cloud," says another, "things are not as they
were, and I am changed."--"I see," says a third, "I touch, but the
things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of
everything."--"Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from
a distant world."--"There is no longer any past for me; people appear
so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a
theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can
no longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my
eyes, but leaves no impression."--"I weep false tears, I have unreal
hands: the things I see are not real things."--Such are expressions
that naturally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their
changed state.[79]

[79] I cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: La Tristesse et
la Joie, 1900.

Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the
profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality
cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must
exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what
world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set
up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperat