Napoleon was no doubt a consummate actor, ready and unscrupulous in imposing on others, but I see no reason to 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 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