St. Paul, before his conversion, distinguished himself by his vehement and cruel persecution of the Christians. It is well known how, only too often, the man of real and fervent religion has to forget his family and make a duty of celibacy and hatred to the other sex. Thus St. Liberata was angry with her husband for weeping at parting from their children; and, according to the legend, the mother of Baruch replied to her son when, during his martyrdom, he implored her for water in his anguish, “Thou shouldst desire no water now save that of heaven.”[476] These cases, moreover, show that, very often, exaggerated altruism is itself only a pathological phenomenon, a hypertrophy of sentiment accompanied--as always happens in cases of hypertrophy--by loss and atrophy in other directions.[477] We have seen in Juan de Dios, in Lazzaretti, Loyola, and St. Francis, of Assisi, saintliness showing itself, in true psychic polarization, as a perfect contrast to their former life in which the tendency to evil was strongly pronounced. If we add to these phenomena, so frequent in epileptic and hysteric patients, all those others, of clairvoyance, thought-transference, transposition of the senses, fakirism, mental vision, temporary manifestations of genius, and monoideism, so frequently observed in these maladies, phenomena so strange that many scientists, unable to explain, endeavour to deny them, we can demonstrate the hysterical character of saintliness, even in its least explicable manifestations--those of miracles.[478] CHAPTER IV. SANE MEN OF GENIUS. Their unperceived defects--Richelieu--Sesostris--Foscolo--Michelangelo--Darwin. But a graver objection is that afforded by those few men of genius who have completed their intellectual orbit without aberration, neither depressed by misfortune nor thrown out of their course by madness.