128 Inquiries into Human Faculty
noted, the visions are found out and discredited, and are no further attended to. In this way the natural tendency to see them is blunted by repression. Therefore, when popular opinion is of a matter-of-fact kind, the seers of visions keep quiet; they do not like to be thought fanciful ‘or mad, and they hide their experiences, which only come to light through inquiries such as these that I have been making. But let the tide of opinion change and grow favourable to supernaturalism, then the seers of visions come to the front. The faintly-perceived fantasies of ordinary persons become invested by the authority of reverend men with a claim to serious regard; they are consequently attended to and encouraged, and they increase in definition through being habitually dwelt upon. We need not sup pose that a faculty previously non-existent has been suddenly evoked, but that a faculty long smothered by many in secret has been suddenly allowed freedom to express itself; and to run into extravagance owing to the removal of reasonable safeguards.
NURTURE AND NATURE.
Man is so educable an animal that it is difficult to distinguish between that part of his character which has been acquired through education and circumstance, and that which was in the original grain of his constitution. His character is exceedingly complex, even in members of the simplest and purest savage race; much more is it so in
-civilised races, who have long since been exempted from the full rigour of natural selection, and have become more ‘mongrel in their breed than any other animal on the face ‘of the earth. Different aspects of the multifarious character of man respond to different calls from without, so that the same individual, and, much more, the same race, may behave very differently at different epochs. There may have been no fundamentalchange of character, but a different phase or mood of it may have been evoked by special
-circumstances, or those persons in whom that mood is naturally dominant may through some accident have the opportunity of acting for the time as representatives of the race. The same nation may be seized by a military fervour
