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Visionaries
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distrust the genuineness of this particular outburst, seeing that it is not the
only instance of his referring to the guidance of his star, as a literal vision
and not as a mere phrase, and that his belief in destiny was notorious.
It appears that stars of this kind, so frequently spoken of in history, and
so well known as a metaphor in language, are a common hallucination of
the insane. Brierre de Boismont has a chapter on the stars of great men. I
cannot doubt that visions of this description were in some cases the basis
of that firm belief in astrology, which not a few persons of eminence
formerly entertained.
The hallucinations of great men may be accounted for in part by their
sharing a tendency which we have seen to be not uncommon in the human
race, and which, if it happens to be natural to them, is liable to be
developed in their overwrought brains by the isolation of their lives. A
man in the position of the first Napoleon could have no intimate
associates; a great philosopher who explores ways of thought far ahead of
his contemporaries must have an inner world in which he passes long and
solitary hours. Great men may be even indebted to touches of madness for
their greatness; the ideas by which they are haunted, and to whose pursuit
they devote themselves, and by which they rise to eminence, having much
in common with the monomania of insanity. Striking instances of great
visionaries may be mentioned, who had almost beyond doubt those very
nervous seizures with which the tendency to hallucinations is intimately
connected. To take a single instance, Socrates, whose daimon was an
audible not a visual appearance, was, as has been often pointed out,
subject to cataleptic seizure, standing all night through in a rigid attitude.
It is remarkable how largely the visionary temperament has manifested
itself in certain periods of history and epochs of national life. My
interpretation of the matter, to a certain extent, is this—That the visionary
tendency is much more common among sane people than is generally
suspected. In early life, it seems to be a hard lesson to an imaginative
child to distinguish between the real and visionary world. If the fantasies
are habitually laughed at and otherwise discouraged, the child soon
acquires the power of distinguishing them; any incongruity or
nonconformity is quickly
