xxxvi INTRODUCTION

frescoes there, with the kind and sympathising permission of the remaining brothers in the Monastery, brought me back into the main elements of thought and effort which had been long before opened in the second volume of Modern Painters (as I have already stated in its Epilogue¹), and which I wish I had then followed with unbroken strength and heart, instead of retreating into the narrow purposes of the book in its original conception. In the declining and shadowy hours of after life, these higher subjects of thought are too great and too fearful for me; and in concurrence with other provocations to labour and causes of sorrow, they have now twice² thrown me into states of mental disease from which I have by little less than miracle recovered.

“But it is due not only to myself, but much more to the readers who have hitherto trusted me, or may hereafter trust, that I should state with extreme decision the difference between these modes of mental wandering, and the conditions which have permanently affected the soundness of conclusion in the thoughts of many men of the highest intellectual power.

“The periods of delirious imagination through which I have myself passed are simply states of prolonged dream-sometimes of actual trance, unconscious of surrounding objects; sometimes of waking fantasy, disguising or associating itself with the immediate realities both of substance and sound; but, whatever its character, recognized afterwards as a dream or vision, just as distinctly as the dreams of common sleep. There is no physical suffering in the state, nor is it otherwise depressing to the system than as leading sometimes, in particular humours of anger or sorrow, to refusal of food. On the contrary, it seems to me that the involuntary wandering of the brain is sometimes almost a rest to it, and at the worst a far less strain than any resolute rational occupation; so that I believe I did myself much more real harm by three days’ steady work on the axes of crystallization in quartz, before my second illness began last February [1881], than I got during the illness itself, from three weeks of the company of uninvited phantoms and the course of imaginary events.

“The recovery from this delirious condition is, indeed, more a consequence of the rest it enforces, than of medicine; and although at first accompanied with much depression of mind (partly natural and well-founded enough, in finding that one has been in a state so disagreeable to one’s friends and so humiliating to oneself), is far more rapid as regards bodily strength than it could be after a

¹ See Vol. IV. pp. 350-352.

² The illnesses of 1878 and 1881.

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