It transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who,
when she is caught in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an
intellect to understand that you wish to release her: and, in the
madness of terror, bites and tears at the hand which tries to do her
good. Yes; very cruel is blind fear. When a man dreads he knows
not what, he will do he cares not what. When he dreads desperately,
he will act desperately. When he dreads beyond all reason, he will
behave beyond all reason. He has no law of guidance left, save the
lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yet his intellect,
left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him into
terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest
animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more
foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can--what the lower
animals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect his
superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of
his blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that--Woe to
the weak! For when he has reduced his superstition to a science,
then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write
books like the "Malleus Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch
literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries;
of which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, and told it
most faithfully and most fairly.
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