Emotion and Reality
When I need someone to tell me how to solve with problem about emotion and reality, this essay appeared. It's one of the most difficult article of that book, the difficult level is the top five. It's the first essay I have met in this level. I will chew and digest it seriously.
Emotion and Reality
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 here is no rational deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. They 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 exist, 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 endowed with 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 doesn't come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the values 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 organic conditions. And as the excited interest which there 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 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 maybe 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.
