A thousand things which shock us at the first blush take on the guise of every-day matters when once we have acquired the habit of familiarity with them.

The timid man, who will not openly acknowledge his feelings, is practically unable to take cognizance of their gradual transformation.

We may add that he is always prone to dream, and peoples his world involuntarily with imaginary utopias, which he begins by considering as desirable, then as possible, and finally as actually existing.

This is the starting-point of boastfulness.  It partakes at once of falsity and of sincerity.  The timid man loves to feel himself important, and he merely pities the people whom he considers incapable of understanding him.  He is, nevertheless, sincere in his bravado, as his dreams entirely deceive him as to his real self.

In his solitary meditations he deliberately shakes off his own personality, as a butterfly abandons the shelter of its chrysalis, and, following the example of that gorgeous insect, he flies away on the wings of his dreams in the guise of the being that he imagines himself to have become.

This creature resembles him not at all.  It is brave, courageous, eloquent.  It accomplishes the most brilliant feats of daring.

In this way, just so soon as the timid man becomes intermittently a braggart, he commences to boast of exploits quite impossible of performance.  We must remember, however, that it is not he who speaks, but merely the idealized ego which he invents because he is chagrined at being misunderstood.

Moral isolation is the parent of other curious phenomena.  It imparts the gift of seeing things exactly as we would wish them to be, by clothing them little by little with a character entirely foreign to that which they really possess.

In “Timidity:  How to Overcome It,” we are told the following little personal anecdote of the Japanese philosopher Yoritomo: 

“It was my misfortune as a child,” says this ancient sage, “to be the victim of a serious illness which kept me confined to a bed and unable to move.

“I was not allowed to read and my only distraction was the study of the objects in my immediate neighborhood.

“The pattern of a screen made a particular impression upon me with its clusters of flowers and its bouquets of roses.

“I passed hours in the contemplation of it.

“At first I merely followed the outlines with my eye, finding in them no more than an artistic reproduction of nature.  But, little by little, the clusters of flowers were transformed into gardens, the rose-trees took on the imposing aspect of forests.  In these gardens my dreams created a princess, and in the forest a company of warriors.

“Then the romance began.

“Every new line I observed became the pretext for creating a new character.  The princess was very soon taken captive by a giant—­whom I saw perfectly—­and the warriors undertook the task of rescue.