[151] Sante de Santis, _I Sogni_, chapter X; Dr. Tissie, _Les Reves_, esp. p. 165, the case of a merchant who dreams of having paid a certain debt, and several weeks afterward meets his creditor, and maintains that they are even, giving way only to proof. [152] For the complete account, see his _Pathologie des emotions_, pp. 345-49. (Paris, F. Alcan.) [153] Dr. Max Simon, in an article on "Imagination in Insanity" (_Annales medico-psychologiques_, December, 1876), holds that every kind of mental disease has its own form of imagination that expresses itself in stories, compositions, sketches, decorations, dress, and symbolic attributes. The maniac invents complicated and improbable designs; the persecuted, symbolic designs, strange writings, bordering on the horrible; megalomaniacs look for the effect of everything they say and do; the general paralytic lives in grandeur and attributes capital importance to everything; lunatics love the naive and childishly wonderful. There are also great imaginers who, having passed through a period of insanity, have strongly regretted it "as a state in which the soul, more exalted and more refined, perceives invisible relations and enjoys spectacles that escape the material eyes." Such was Gerard de Nerval. As for Charles Lamb, he would assert that he should be envied the days spent in an insane asylum. "Sometimes," he said in a letter to Coleridge, "I cast a longing glance backwards to the condition in which I found myself; for while it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Do not believe, Coleridge, that you have tasted the grandeur and all the transport of fancy if you have not been insane. Everything seems to me now insipid in comparison." Quoted by A. Barine, _Nevroses_, p. 326. [154] There has often been cited the instance of certain maniacs at Charenton, who, during the Franco-Prussian War, despite the stories that were told them, the papers that they read, and the shells bursting under the walls of the asylum, maintained that the war was only imagined, and that all was only a contrivance of their persecutors. APPENDICES APPENDIX A THE VARIOUS FORMS OF INSPIRATION[155] Among the descriptions of the inspired state found in various authors, I select only three, which are brief and have each a special character. I. Mystic inspiration, in a passive form, in Jacob Boehme (_Aurora_): "I declare before God that I do not myself know how the thing arises within me, without the participation of my will. I do not even know that which I must write. If I write, it is because the Spirit moves me and communicates to me a great, wonderful knowledge. Often I do not even know whether I dwell in spirit in this present world and whether it is I myself that have the fortune to possess a certain and solid knowledge."