They occur, however, on the one hand, in connection with other physical disorders, as in the case of the attack of the “English Sweat” or influenza which Luther had in 1529, and which was accompanied by severe mental struggles; on the other hand, they appear at times to excite the bodily emotion of fear and in very extreme cases undoubtedly tended to produce entire loss of sleep and appetite, cardiac disturbance and fainting fits. Luther himself once said, in 1533, that his “gloomy thoughts and temptations” were the cause of the trouble in his head and stomach;[346] in his ordinary language the temptations were, however, “buffets given him by Satan.”[347] He is fond of clothing the temptations in this Pauline figure and of depicting them as his worst trials, and only quite exceptionally does he call his purely physical sufferings “_colaphi Satanæ_,” they, too, coming from Satan. Now we cannot of course entirely trust Luther’s own diagnosis—otherwise we should have to reduce all his maladies to a work of evil spirits—yet his feeling that the “temptations” were on the one hand a malady in themselves and on the other a source of many other ills, should carry some weight with us. It is also clear that, in the case of an undertaking like Luther’s, and given his antecedents, remorse of conscience was perfectly natural even had there been no ailment present. It was impossible that a once zealous monk should become faithless to his most solemn vows and, on his own authority and on alleged discoveries in the Bible, dare to overthrow the whole ecclesiastical structure of the past without in so doing experiencing grave misgivings. Add to this his violence, his “wild-beast fury” (J. von Walther), his practical contradictions and the theological mistakes which he was unable to hide. Hence we need have no scruple about admitting what is otherwise fairly evident, viz. that his ghostly combats stand apart and cannot be attributed directly to any bodily ailment. It remains, however, true that such struggles and temptations throve exceedingly on the morbid fear which lay hidden in the depths of his soul. It must also be granted that neurasthenia sometimes gives rise to symptoms of fear similar to those experienced by Luther, as we shall hear later on from an expert in nervous diseases, whom we shall have occasion to quote (see section 5 below). Consideration for such facts oblige the layman to leave the question open as to how much of Luther’s fear is to be attributed to nervousness or to other physical drawbacks.