With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none the less distressing fears about health which beset people all their lives, in some cases; it is extremely annoying to healthy people to find a man reduced to depression and silence at the possibility of taking cold, or at the fear of having eaten something unwholesome.  I remember an elderly gentleman who had lived a vigorous and unselfish life, and was indeed a man of force and character, whose activity was entirely suspended in later years by his fear of catching cold or of over-tiring himself.  He was a country clergyman, and used to spend the whole of Sunday between his services, in solitary seclusion, “resting,” and retire to bed the moment the evening service was over; moreover his dread of taking cold was such that he invariably wore a hat in the winter months to go from the drawing-room to the dining-room for dinner, even if there were guests in his house.  He used to jest about it, and say that it no doubt must look curious; but he added that he had found it a wise precaution, and that we had no idea how disabling his colds were.  Even a very healthy friend of my own standing has told me that if he ever lies awake at night he is apt to exaggerate the smallest and most trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom of some dangerous disease.  Let me quote the well-known case of Hans Andersen, whose imagination was morbidly strong.  He found one morning when he awoke that he had a small pimple under his left eyebrow.  He reflected with distress upon the circumstance, and soon came to the rueful conclusion that the pimple would probably increase in size, and deprive him of the sight of his left eye.  A friend calling upon him in the course of the morning found him writing, in a mood of solemn resignation, with one hand over the eye in question, “practising,” as he said, “how to read and write with the only eye that would soon be left him.”

One’s first impulse is to treat these self-inflicted sufferings as ridiculous and almost idiotic.  But they are quite apt to beset people of effectiveness and ability.  To call them irrational does not cure them, because they lie deeper than any rational process, and are in fact the superficial symptoms of some deep-seated weakness of nerve, while their very absurdity, and the fact that the mind cannot throw them off, only proves how strong they are.  They are in fact signs of some profound uneasiness of mind; and the rational brain of such people, casting about for some reason to explain the fear with which they are haunted, fixes on some detail which is not worthy of serious notice.  It is of course a species of local insanity and monomania, but it does not imply any general obscuration of faculties at all.  Some of the most intellectual people are most at the mercy of such trials, and indeed they are rather characteristic of men and women whose brain is apt to work at high pressure.  One recollects in the life of Shelley, how he used to be haunted by these insupportable fears.  He was at one time persuaded that he had contracted leprosy, and he used to disconcert his acquaintances by examining solicitously their wrists and necks to see if he could detect symptoms of the same disease.