of the facts. All our experiences are
made up of two elements: first, the outward circumstance, and second,
the inward interpretation. On the one side is our environment, the
world we live in, the things that befall us, the kaleidoscopic changes
of fortune in the scenery of which our lives are set. On the other
side are the inward interpretations that we give to this outward
circumstance. Experience is compounded of these two elements.

This clearly is true in ordinary living. Two men, let us say, go to
their physicians and are told that they have only a few months to live.
This is the fact which faces both of them. As we watch them, however,
we are at once aware that this fact is not the whole of their
experience. One of the men crumples up; he "collapses into a yielding
mass of plaintiveness and fear." Thinking of the event which he is
facing, he sees nothing there but horror. That is his interpretation
of it. The other man so looks upon the event which is coming that his
family, far from having to support his spirit, are supported by him.
He buoys them up; he carries them along; his faith and courage are
contagious; and when he thinks of his death it appears in his eyes a
great adventure concerning which the old hymn told the truth:

"It were a well-spent journey
Though seven deaths lay between."

That is his interpretation. As we regard the finished experiences of
these two men, we see clearly that, while the same fact lay at the
basis of both, it was the inward interpretation that determined the
quality of the experience.

This power to transform facts so that they will be no longer merely
facts, but facts plus an interpretation, is one of the most distinctive
and significant elements in human life. The animals do not possess it.
An event befalls a dog and, when the dog is through with it, the event
is what it was before. The dog has done nothing to it. But the same
event befalls a man and at once something begins to happen to it. It
is clothed in the man's thought about it; it is dressed in his
appreciation and understanding; it is transformed by his
interpretations. The event comes out of that man's life something
altogether different from what it was when it went in. The man can do
almost anything with that event. For our experiences do not fall into
our lives in single lumps, like meteors from a distant sky of fate; our
experiences always are made up of the fortunes that befall us and