may here get into a snarl from which extrication is
slow work. Neither is it possible to counteract an unpleasant
brain-impression by something pleasant but false. We must call a
spade a spade, but not consider it a component part of the man who
handles it, nor yet associate the man with the spade, or the spade
with the man. When we drop it, so long as we drop it for what it is
worth, which is nothing in the case of the spade in question, we
have dropped it entirely. If we try to improve our brain-impression
by insisting that a spade is something better and pleasanter, we are
transforming a disagreeable impression to a mongrel state which
again brings anything but a happy result.

Simply to refuse all unpleasant brain-impressions, with no effort or
desire to recast them into something that they are not, seems to be
the only clear process to freedom. Not only so, but whatever there
might have been pleasant in what seemed entirely unpleasant can more
truly return as we drop the unpleasantness completely. It is a good
thing that most of us can approach the freedom of such a change in
imagination before we reach it in reality. So we can learn more
rapidly not to hamper ourselves or others by retaining disagreeable
brain-impressions of the present, or by recalling others of the past.

V.

THE TRIVIALITY OF TRIVIALITIES.

LIFE is clearer, happier, and easier for us as things assume their
true proportions. I might better say, as they come nearer in
appearance to their true proportions; for it seems doubtful whether
any one ever reaches the place in this world where the sense of
proportion is absolutely normal. Some come much nearer than others;
and part of the interest of living is the growing realization of
better proportion, and the relief from the abnormal state in which
circumstances seem quite out of proportion in their relation to one
another.

Imagine a landscape-painter who made his cows as large as the
houses, his blades of grass waving above the tops of the trees, and
all things similarly disproportionate. Or, worse, imagine a disease
of the retina which caused a like curious change in the landscape
itself wherein a mountain appeared to be a mole-hill, and a
mole-hill a mountain.

It seems absurd to think of. And, yet, is not the want of a true
sense of proportion in the circumstances and relations of life quite
as extreme with many of us? It is well that our physical sense
remains intact. If we lost th