Translated into simple everyday terms, this doctrine in its application to the personal life means that the value of any external fact or possession or experience depends on the way in which we take it. Take riches, for example. Stocks and bonds, real estate and mortgages, money and bank accounts, in themselves do not make a man either rich or poor. They may enrich or they may impoverish his personality. It is not until they are taken up into the mind, thought over, related to one's general scheme of conduct, made the basis of one's purposes and plans, that they become a factor in the personal life. Obviously the same amount of money, a hundred thousand dollars, may be worked over into personal life in a great variety of ways. One man is made proud by it. Another is made lazy. Another is made hard-hearted. Another is made avaricious for more. Another is fired with the desire to speculate. Another is filled with anxiety lest he may lose it. All these are obviously impoverished by the so-called wealth which they possess. To rich men's wives and children, whose wealth comes without the strenuous exertion and close human contact involved in earning it, it generally works their personal impoverishment in one or more of these fatal ways. For wealth, in an indolent, self-indulgent, vain, conceited, ostentatious, unsympathetic mind, takes on the colour of these odious qualities, and becomes a curse to its possessor; just because he or she is cursed with these evil propensities already, and the wealth simply adds fuel to the preëxistent, though perhaps latent and smouldering flames. On the other hand one man is made grateful for the wealth he has been able to accumulate. Another is made more sympathetic. Another is made generous. Another is urged into the larger public service his independent means makes possible. Another is lifted up into a sense of responsibility for its right use. On the whole the men and women who earn their money honestly are usually affected in one or more of these beneficial ways, and their wealth becomes an enrichment of their personality.