On the other hand there is the converse fact that the voice may be influenced through expression and gesture. If we fix an expression on our features or bring our body into an attitude which involves passional excitement we may be sure that we will be affected more or less by the appropriate emotion. This statement, formulated by Maudsley, is perfectly true and may be proved by anybody at any moment. It presents itself to us as an effective corroboration of the so well-known phenomenon of “talking-yourself-into-it.” Suppose you correctly imagine how a very angry man looks: frowning brow, clenched fists, gritting teeth, hoarse, gasping voice, and suppose you imitate. Then, even if you feel most harmless and order-loving, you become quite angry though you keep up the imitation only a little while. By means of the imitation of lively bodily changes you may in the same way bring yourself into any conceivable emotional condition, the outer expressions of which appear energetically. It must have occurred to every one of us how often prisoners present so well the excitement of passion that their earnestness is actually believed; as for example, the anger of a guiltless suspect or of an obviously needy person, of a man financially ruined by his trusted servant, etc. Such scenes of passion happen daily in every court-house and they are so excellently presented that even an experienced judge believes in their reality and tells himself that such a thing can not be imitated because the imitation is altogether too hard to do and still harder to maintain. But in reality the presentation is not so wonderful, and taken altogether, is not at all skilful; whoever wants to manifest _anger_ must make the proper gestures (and that requires no art) and when he makes the gestures the necessary conditions occur and these stimulate and cause the correct manifestation of the later gestures, while these again influence the voice. Thus without any essential mummery the comedy plays itself out, self-sufficient, correct, convincing. Alarming oneself is not performed by words, but by the reciprocal influence of word and gesture, and the power of that influence is observable in the large number of cases where, in the end, people themselves believe what they have invented. If they are of delicate spiritual equilibrium they even become hypochondriacs. Writing, and the reading of writing, is to be considered in the same way as gesticulation; it has the same alarming influence on voice and general appearance as the other, so that it is relatively indifferent whether a man speaks and acts or writes and thinks. This fact is well known to everybody who has ever in his life written a really coarse letter.