[Footnote 5: Hartley, _Observations on Man_, i. 493.] Deliberate resentment considers the motives of acts. Suppose that a man tells us an untruth. Our feelings towards him are not the same if he did it in order to save our life as if he did it for his own benefit. Moreover, our anger abates, or ceases altogether, if we find that he who injured us acted under compulsion, or under the influence or a non-volitional impulse, too strong for any ordinary man to resist. Then, the main cause or the injury was not his will, conceived as a continuous entity. It yielded to the will of somebody else, reluctantly, as it were out of necessity, or to a powerful conation which forms no part of his real self. He was merely an instrument in another's hands, or he was "beside himself," "beyond himself," "out of his {317} mind." When we are angry, says Montaigne, "it is passion that speaks, and not we."[6] The religious psychology of the ancient Greeks ascribed acts committed upon sudden excitement of mind to the _Ate_ which bewilders the mind and betrays the man into deeds which, in his sober senses, he is heartily sorry for. Hence the Ate has in its train the _Litae_--the humble prayers of repentance, which must make good, before gods and men, whatever has been done amiss.[7] The Vedic singer apologises, "It is not our own will, Varuna, that leads us astray, but some seduction--wine, anger, dice, and our folly."[8] In the Andaman Islands violent outbreaks of ill-temper or resentment are looked upon as the result of a temporary "possession," and the victim is, for the time being, considered unaccountable for his actions.[9] Madness, as we have seen, is frequently attributed to demoniacal possession. In ancient Ireland, again, it was believed to be often brought on by malignant magical agency, usually the work of some druid, hence in the Glosses to the Senchus Mór a madman is repeatedly described as one "upon whom the magic wisp has been thrown."[10] What a person does in madness is not an act committed by _him_. "Was 't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet: If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness: if 't be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd; His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy."[11] [Footnote 6: Montaigne, _Essais_, ii. 31 (_[OE]uvres_, p. 396).] [Footnote 7: _Iliad_, ix. 505 _sqq._ Müller, _Dissertations on the Eumenides_, p. 108.] [Footnote 8: _Rig-Veda_, vii. 86. 6.] [Footnote 9: Man, in _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._ xii. 111.] [Footnote 10: Joyce, _Social History of Ancient Ireland_, i. 224.] [Footnote 11: Shakespeare, _Hamlet_, v. 2.]