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dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first
cause of his musings, entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the
primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through
the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.
Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously
returning in upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were
never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first
cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally
exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In
a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as
I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the
speculative.
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the
disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative
and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the
disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the
noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, "De Amplitudine Beati Regni
Dei;" St. Austin's great work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "De
Carne Christi," in which the paradoxical sentence "Mortuus est Dei
filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum
est quia impossibile est," occupied my undivided time, for many weeks
of laborious and fruitless investigation.
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