folly upon either side (and the mass of it daily increases)--that it
would be a wholesome thing if one could take such a talker and make him
walk from Dover to the Solway, exercising some care that he should rise
before the sun, and that he should see in clear weather the views of
which I speak. A man who has done that has seen England--not the name or
the map or the rhetorical catchword, but the thing. And it does not take
so very long.




The Lunatic


Those who are interested in what simple straightforward people call the
Pathology of Consciousness have gathered a great body of evidence upon
the various manias that affect men, and there is an especially
interesting department of this which concerns illusion upon matters
which in the sane are determinable by the senses and common experience.
Thus one man will believe himself to be the Emperor of China, another to
be William Shakespeare or some other impossible person, though one would
imagine that his every accident of daily life would convince him to the
contrary.

I had recently occasion to watch one of the most harmless and yet one of
the most striking of these illusions in a private asylum which has
specialized, if I may so express myself, upon men of letters. The case
was harmless and even benign, for the poor fellow was not of a combative
disposition to begin with, was of too careful and dignified a
temperament to show more than slight irritation if his delusion were