than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps if we
speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state.
There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate
over his reason who can regulate his attention wholly by his will,
and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be
found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and
force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.
All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity, but while
this power is such as we can control and repress it is not visible
to others, nor considered as any deprivation of the mental
faculties; it is not pronounced madness but when it becomes
ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action.

"To indulge the power of fiction and send imagination out upon the
wing is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent
speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour
of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry
will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing
external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own
thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is
pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity,
and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present
moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible
enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The
mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all
combinations, and riots in delights which Nature and fortune, with
all their bounty, cannot bestow.

"In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all
other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in