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"The possessed man ... rationally finds a spiritual cause for his sufferings.... Especially when the mysterious unseen power throws him helpless on the ground, jerks and writhes him in convulsions, makes him leap upon the bystanders with a giant's strength and a wild beast's ferocity, impels him with distorted face and frantic gesture, and voice not his own nor seemingly even human, to pour forth wild incoherent raving, or with thought and eloquence beyond his sober faculties to command, to counsel, to foretell such a one seems to those who watch him, and even to himself, to have become the mere instrument of a spirit which has seized him or entered into him, a possessing demon in whose personality the patient believes so implicitly that he often imagines a personal name for it, which it can declare when it speaks in its own voice and character through his organs of speech."
"This is one of his ecstatic moments," whispered Madame von Brandt. "He has the whim to consider himself an original; he imagines himself a Petrarch enamored of his Laura. We will allow him to dream awhile, and speak of our own affairs.
When it is warm weather, one views with a comparative resignation the Prussian batteries, and one has a sort of fanatical belief that the bombs will not burst within striking distance; when the thermometer is below zero, one imagines that every cannon within four miles is pointed at one's head. I do not know how it may be with others, but on me cold has a most unheroic effect.
How infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare, Cromwell and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who, nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has the last half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau, on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions!
'Please take a chair, Mr. Macpherson. Do you mean to say you go round London with a hundred and fifty pounds worth of goods under your arm in this careless way? The young man laughed. 'I run very little risk, Mr. Webster. I don't suppose anyone I meet imagines for a moment there is more under my arm than perhaps a trio of volumes I have picked up in the fourpenny box to take home with me.
But the right of the strongest is the violation of all rights; it can pass as a right but in the eyes of a savage conqueror, who, in the intoxication of his fury, imagines he has the right to do as he pleases with the unfortunate ones whom he has conquered; this barbarous right can appear legitimate only to slaves, who are blind enough to think that everything is allowed to tyrants, who are too strong for them to resist.
It is not, then, that this poor bride commits the faults of which she imagines herself guilty, for in heart she was never purer than now; but her senses and natural powers, particularly the senses, being unsupported, wander away.
He imagines them like himself, and supposes them to have feelings and passions like his own, to reason as he does, and even if he is told they speak as he does, that is not incredible to him.
In addition to his severe treatment of that poet, in "P's Correspondence," he says in "Earth's Holocaust," where he imagines the works of various authors to be consumed in a bonfire: "Speaking of the properties of flame, me-thought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day, contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of black vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron."
He is greatly concerned for his flock, for the city, and for your Majesty's authority, and though I am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he imagines, yet his scruples in this case are to be commended in him as laudable and religious."
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