interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in
the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has
human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The external
fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of
the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our
own bosoms--it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this is
the case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are
merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they
are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our
experience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world of
emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world
of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it
therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till
absorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor's
genius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who
makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scene
that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any
illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.

And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through our
own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret the
external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known
only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to
our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never
seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is
not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within
its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live
in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto
ourselves abides,--the human soul, though never seen face to face. To
enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as