Thus to learn the lessons of experience is to undergo a transvaluation of the values we bring with us from the womb and to transmute our naive impulses. The breakdown of the infantile adjustment in which providential powers ministered to every wish compels us either to flee from reality or to understand it. And by understanding it we create new objects of desire. For when we know a good deal about a thing, know how it originated, how it is likely to behave, what it is made of, and what is its place amidst other things, we are dealing with something quite different from the simple object naively apprehended. The understanding creates a new environment. The more subtle and discriminating, the more informed and [p182] sympathetic the understanding is, the more complex and yet ordered do the things about us become. To most of us, as Mr. Santayana once said, music is a pleasant noise which produces a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills. But the trained musician hears what we do not hear at all; he hears the form, the structure, the pattern, and the significance of an ideal world. A naturalist out of doors perceives a whole universe of related life which the rest of us do not even see. A world which is ordinarily unseen has become visible through the understanding. When the mind has fetched it out of the flux of dumb sensations, defined it and fixed it, this unseen world becomes more real than the dumb sensations it supplants. When the understanding is at work, it is as if circumstance had ceased to mutter strange sounds and had begun to speak our language. When experience is understood, it is no longer what it is wholly to the infant, very largely to youth, and in great measure to most men, a succession of desirable objects at which they instinctively grasp, interspersed with undesirable ones from which they instinctively shrink. If objects are seen in their context, in the light of their origin and destiny, with sympathy for their own logic and their own purposes, they become interesting in themselves, and are no longer blind stimuli to pleasant and unpleasant sensations.