ving
them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sense
of what they had talked of; which accordingly he performed, giving
them a full account of what had passed between them in his absence.
The scholars being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them
satisfaction, by telling them that what he did was by the power of
imagination, his phantasy leading theirs; and that himself had
dictated to them the discourse they had held together while he was
from them; that there were warrantable ways of heightening the
imagination to that pitch as to bend another's, and that when he had
compassed the whole secret, some parts of which he was yet ignorant
of, he intended to leave their company and give the world an account
of what he had learned.

If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men, must be
for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and all men,
especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life, must be
continually passing under their power. Our most elaborate thoughts,
elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think, not really
ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell or down out of
heaven. The historian should remember, should he not? angels and devils
not less than kings and soldiers, and plotters and thinkers. What matter
if the angel or devil, as indeed certain old writers believed, first
wrapped itself with an organized shape in some man's imagination? what
matter 'if God himself only acts or is in existing beings or men,' as
Blake believed? we must none the less admit that invisible beings, far
wandering influences, shapes that may have floated from a hermit of the
wilderness, brood over council-chambers and studies and battle-fields. We
should never be certain that it was not some woman treading in the
wine-press who began that subtle change in men's minds, that powerful
movement of thought and imagination about which so many Germans have
written; or that the passion, because of which so many countries were
given to the sword, did not begin in the mind of some shepherd boy,
lighting up his eyes for a moment before it ran upon its way.

V

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly
and obviousl