This is illustrated, as Harriet C. B. Alexander has shown,[181] in George Eliot, who during childhood "suffered from a low general state of health and great susceptibility to terror at night, and the liability to have all her soul become a quivering fear," which remained during life. She had periods of depression and vertex headache, which latter gave place to sick headache, often attended with rheumatoid phenomena. "She was an awkward girl, reserved and serious far beyond her years, but observant, and addicted to the habit of sitting in corners and watching her elders." Fear of the unknown in childhood, seemingly a reversion to the fear of the unknown of savages, tends, like it, to produce occult belief. Despite the German rationalism of George Eliot, such fear found utterance in her _Behind the Veil_, a mystically occult contrast with her novels and with the positivism which was her religion. Theoretically the philosophy of George Eliot should have destroyed much mysticism, yet as a survival of "night terrors" it came to the surface. A very vivid autobiographical narrative of night-terrors and similar nervous phenomena in the childhood of a distinguished man of letters will be found in Horatio Brown's _Life of John Addington Symonds_. School over-pressure in certain respects checks, even in well-developed minds, the transition from the terror of the unknown of childhood into the calm of maturity. Morbid fears, imperative conceptions, and imperative acts which torture the individual during an otherwise healthy career unquestionably originate in the early periods of life.