308 PSYCHOLOGY. 



The greatest proof that a man is sid compos is his ability 

 to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting 

 idea. To give this power is the highest result of education. 

 In untutored minds the power does not exist. Every excit- 

 ing tliougJit in the natural man carries credence with it. To 

 conceive ivith passion is eo ipso to affirm. As Bagehot says : 



"The Caliph Omar burnt the Alexandrian Library, saying: 'AH 

 books which contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous. All which 

 contain what is in it are useless ! ' Probably no one ever had an intenser 

 belief in anything than Omar had in this. Yet it is impossible to 

 imagine it preceded by an argument. His belief in Mahomet, in the 

 Koran, and in the sutficiency of the Koran, probably came to him in 

 spontaneous rushes of emotion ; there may have been little vestiges of 

 argument floating here and there, but they did not justify the strength 

 of the emotion, still less did they create it, and they hardly even excused 

 it. . . . Probably, when the subject is thoroughly examined, conviction 

 will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one 

 most closely connected with the bodily state, . . . accompanied or pre- 

 ceded by the sensation that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude 

 of a prophecy : 



' At length the fatal answer came, 

 In characters of living flame — 

 Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll, 

 But borne and branded on my soul.' 



A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states 

 of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed 

 of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this 

 intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in 

 which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt it in his anti- 

 Catholicism ; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Protestantism; and both, I 

 suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel it." * 



The reason of the belief is undoubtedly the bodily com- 

 motion which the exciting idea sets up. ' Nothing which 

 I can feel like that can be false.' All our religious and 

 supernatural beliefs are of this order. The surest warrant 

 for immortality is the yearning of our bowels for our dear 

 ones ; for God, the sinking sense it gives us to imagine no 

 such Providence or help. So of our political or pecuniary 

 hopes and fears, and things and persons dreaded and 



* W. Bagehot, 'The Emotion of Conviction,' Literary Studies, L 

 412-17. 



