The Psychological Consequences of Her edify. 325 



reason, method and rational explanations, whose special effect is 

 to develop the mind ; they, on the contrary, were the prey of wild 

 passions, tossed from pole to pole of thought, from orgies to 

 ecstasies, by some conversion sudden as a thunderclap. As 

 they felt much and thought little, they knew nothing even in old 

 age, whereas we even in childhood know much. They died 

 young, we are born old. 



Hence it is that their chroniclers give those accounts of miracles, 

 prodigies, apparitions and dreams which succeed each other with- 

 out end or truce, sometimes touching and poetic, oftener extrava- 

 gant and puerile. They are at home in this world of imagination; 

 to them a prodigy appears perfectly simple, an apparition quite 

 natural ; miracle is, for them, matter of course. These things 

 they recount simply, and without the shadow of a doubt, as they 

 do a siege or battle. The universe, which for us is an infinitely 

 complex mechanism, ruled by fixed laws down to its minutest 

 details, was for them a wondrous stage, whereon mysterious person- 

 ages moved the scenes. If, now, we bring all these facts together, 

 and endeavour to trace them to their cause that is, to the habitual 

 state of the human soul which produced them we shall, without 

 much difficulty, find that the chief characteristic of the Middle 

 Ages was lively imagination, internal vision. But experimental 

 psychology proves, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that the 

 difference between lively imagination and hallucination is only a 

 Difference of degree ; so that, indeed, every great artist, every seer, 

 is more or less subject to hallucination. Hence we are led to 

 conclude that the Middle Ages were ever on the border of halluci- 

 nation, if they did not overstep it. In several of these chroniclers' 

 stories we also meet with the oppression of nightmare, and with 

 the painful visions accompanying it ; for generally the visions are 

 painful, though usually so distinct, so full and minute in detail, 

 that we feel that this has been seen. 1 



1 Marvellous stories abound in nearly all these chronicles, and we might men- 

 tion in particular, Gregory of Tours, Frodoardus, Mathew of Westminster, 

 Raoul Glaber, and Guibert de Nogent in his Life, The two latter authors are 

 specially interesting from our present point of view. It would be impossible 

 to find hallucination better characterized than in the two following narra- 

 tives : 



