These reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in passing a
shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many
as the other, according to their ability to react. The man who was
locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered
for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. He had
really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of
life during that hour.

=Illustrations.=--In the case of dreams, we are told that years may be
condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of
reactions. The rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves
manifest on the face of the dreamer. Beads of perspiration and facial
contortions betoken intensity of feeling. In such an experience life is
intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a
case, it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches
bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these
extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of one may have
but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand.
The life of Job is an apt illustration. No one has been able to sound
the depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the
heights of his exaltation. We may not readily compute the octaves in
such a life as his.

=The complexity of life.=--It is not easy to think life, much less
define it. The elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the
mind. It looks out at one from so many corners that it seems Argus-eyed.
At one moment we see it on the Stock Exchange where men struggle and
strive in a mad frenzy of competition; at another, in a quiet home,
where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition
but, rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the