ENDS AND MEANS
stances, partly, and more profoundly, on the nature of the
efforts we have made to realize our ideal and the nature of
the ideal we have tried to realize. The fact that knowing
depends upon being leads, of course, to an immense amount
of misunderstanding. The meaning of words, for example,
changes profoundly according to the character and experi-
ences of the user. Thus, to the saint, words like 'love,'
'charity/ * compassion* mean something quite different
from what they mean to the ordinary man. Again, to the
ordinary man, Spinoza's statement that * blessedness is not
the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself* seems simply
untrue. Being virtuous is, for him, a most tedious and
distressing process. But it is clear that to someone who
has trained himself in goodness, virtue really is blessedness,
while the life of the ordinary man, with its petty vices and
its long spells of animal thoughtlessness and insentience,
seems a real torture. In view of the fact that knowing is
conditioned by being and that being can be profoundly
modified by training, we are justified in ignoring most of
the arguments by which non-mystics have sought to dis-
credit the experience of mystics. The being of a colour-
blind man is such that he is not competent to pass judgment
on a painting. The colour-blind man cannot be educated
into seeing colours, and in this respect he is different from
the Indian musician, who begins by finding European
symphonies merely deafening and bewildering, but can be
trained, if he so desires, to perceive the beauties of this
kind of music. Similarly, the being of a non-mystical
person is such that he cannot understand the nature of the
mystic's intuitions. Like the Indian musician, however, he
is at liberty, if he so chooses, to have some kind of direct
experience of what at present he does not understand. This
training is one which he will certainly find extremely
tedious; for it involves, first, the leading of a life of
constant awareness and unremitting moral effort, second,
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