The Force of Imagination: Montaigne erasure pt. 1

of the force of Imagination.

I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of Imagination: every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very piercing impression upon me and I make it my business to avoid, wanting force to resist it. I could live by

the sole help of healthful and jolly company: the very sight of another's pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person. A perpetual cough in another tickles my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to whom I less look. I take possession of the disease I am concerned. at, and take it to myself. I do not at all wonder that fancy should give fevers and sometimes kill such as to allow it

too much scope, and are too willing to entertain it. Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time: I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old fellow's house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with his patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be pleased with his company, I might come often to see him, by which means, and by fixing his eye upon the freshness of my complexion, and his

imagination upon the sprightliness and vigor that glowed in my youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I then was, his habit to body might, peradventure, be amended; but be forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse.

Gallus VibIus so long cudgeled his brains to find out the essence and motions of madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a degree, that he could never after recover his judgment; and might brag that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being unbound to have his pardon read to him, was

found stark dead upon the scaffold, by the stroke of Imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale, and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed, feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes to expiring. And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires: "Ut, quasi transactis saepe omnibu rebu profundant Fluminis ingentes fluctus, vestemque cruentent."