etc.]

A long and severe crisis preceded Mohammed's call. He was convinced that,
if he were the man, mighty signs from Heaven must be revealed to him, for
his conception of revelation was mechanical; Allah Himself, or at least
angels, must speak to him. The time of waiting, the process of objectifying
the subjective, lived through by the help of an overstrained imagination,
all this laid great demands upon the psychical and physical constitution of
Mohammed. At length he saw and heard that which he thought he ought to hear
and see. In feverish dreams he found the form for the revelation, and he
did not in the least realize that the contents of his inspiration from
Heaven were nothing but the result of what he had himself absorbed. He
realized it so little, that the identity of what was revealed to him with
what he held to be the contents of the Scriptures of Jews and Christians
was a miracle to him, the only miracle upon which he relied for the support
of his mission.

In the course of the twenty-three years of Mohammed's work as God's
messenger, the over-excited state, or inspiration, or whatever we may
call the peculiar spiritual condition in which his revelation was born,
gradually gave place to quiet reflection. Especially after the Hijrah, when
the prophet had to provide the state established by him at Medina with
inspired regulations, the words of God became in almost every respect
different from what they had been at first. Only the form was retained. In
connection with this evolution, some of our biographers of Mohammed, even
where they do not deny the obvious honesty of his first visions, represent
him in the second half of his work, as a sort of actor, who played with
that which had been most sacred to him. This accusation is, in my opinion,
unjust.