Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as a symbolic designation forthe point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man'sconsciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which ittakes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racketby which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitiveto small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low "difference-threshold"--hismind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so wemight speak of a "pain-threshold," a "fear-threshold," a "misery-threshold," and find it quicklyoverpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be oftenreached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny sideof their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.
There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to theircredit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightestirritants fatally send them over.
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold mightneed a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other? This question, of therelativity of different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point, andwill became a serious problem ere we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, wemust address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their ownpeculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and theirsky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for theUniverse!--God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity, pain,and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put intoour hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.
To begin with, how CAN things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford astable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disasterare always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the oldpoet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff ofmelancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of comingfrom a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at theirtouch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it with her, he would sanction everything at oncehe answered..
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