lished contents of value, just
as nutrition is the preservation of life by means of the conversion of
foreign matter into the form and substance of the body. By bowels and by
brain, what is necessary, what will feed the irrationally given
interest, is preserved and consumed: the rest is cast off as waste, as
irrelevance, as contradiction.

The relation may, of course, also reverse itself. Face to face with the
immovable and inexorable, the mind may accept it with due resignation,
or it may challenge its tyranny and exclude it from its world. It may
seek or create or discover a substitute that it is content to accept,
though this will in turn alter the course and character of the interest
which in such an instance defines the mind's action. Thus, a way out
for one of the lovers of the same girl might be to become a depressed
and yearning bachelor, realizing his potential sexuality in the
vicarious reproduction of reverie and sentiment; another might be to
divert the stream of his affections to another girl, reorganizing his
life about a different center and acquiring a new system of practical
values determined by this center; a third might be a complete
redirection of his sexual energies upon objects the interest in which we
would call, abnormal and anti-social in one case, and in another lofty
and spiritual. In the latter case sexuality would have been
depersonalized; it would have changed into poetic and humanitarian
passion; it would have become love as Plato means us to take the word.
But each of these processes would have been a conversion, through the
need defined by an identical instinct, of the _same into the different_;
the human nature which existed at the beginning of the change would be
deeply other than the human nature in which the change culminated. In
each case a condition thrust upon the spirit by its environment would
have occasioned the creation and maintenance of an environment demanded
by the spirit. Yet in so far as it was not truly _the same_ as that
envisaged in the primitive demand, it would still imply the tragedy of
the world not made for us and the "problem of evil," in which the life
of the spirit is persistently a salvage of one of two always
incompatible goods, a saving by surrender.

And this is all that a mind is--an affair of saving and rejecting, of
valuing with a system of objects of which a living body and its desires
and operations, its interests, are focal and the objects marginal,