thy friend of my own standing has told
me that if he ever lies awake at night he is apt to exaggerate the
smallest and most trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom of some
dangerous disease. Let me quote the well-known case of Hans Andersen,
whose imagination was morbidly strong. He found one morning when he
awoke that he had a small pimple under his left eyebrow. He reflected
with distress upon the circumstance, and soon came to the rueful
conclusion that the pimple would probably increase in size, and deprive
him of the sight of his left eye. A friend calling upon him in the
course of the morning found him writing, in a mood of solemn
resignation, with one hand over the eye in question, "practising," as
he said, "how to read and write with the only eye that would soon be
left him."

One's first impulse is to treat these self-inflicted sufferings as
ridiculous and almost idiotic. But they are quite apt to beset people
of effectiveness and ability. To call them irrational does not cure
them, because they lie deeper than any rational process, and are in
fact the superficial symptoms of some deep-seated weakness of nerve,
while their very absurdity, and the fact that the mind cannot throw
them off, only proves how strong they are. They are in fact signs of
some profound uneasiness of mind; and the rational brain of such
people, casting about for some reason to explain the fear with which
they are haunted, fixes on some detail which is not worthy of serious
notice. It is of course a species of local insanity and monomania, but
it does not imply any general obscuration of faculties at all. Some of
the most intellectual people are most at the mercy of such trials, and
indeed they are rather characteristic of men and women whose brain is
apt to work at high pressure. One recollects in the life of Shelley,
how he used to be haunted by these insupportable fears. He was at one
time persuaded that he had contracted leprosy, and he used to
disconcert his acquaintances by examining solicitously their wrists and
necks to see if he could detect symptoms of the same disease.

There is very little doubt that as medical knowledge progresses we
shall know more about the cause of such hallucinations. To call them
unreal is mere stupidity. Sensible people who suffer from them are
often perfectly well aware of their unreality, and are profoundly
humiliated by them. They are some disease or weakness of the
imaginative faculty; and a