Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/97

 There are few people who are not under the obligation of believing many things which on closer thought they would not understand at all. This they do simply on the authority of what others say; or they think that they lack the auxiliary knowledge necessary to remove all scruple. Thus it is possible for a principle to be generally believed on all hands the truth of which no one has ever verified. That we should see ourselves in dreams is due to the fact that we frequently look at ourselves in the glass without thinking that the object is a mere image. The imagination, however, is more vivid in dreams, but thought and consciousness less so. There is a certain state of mindand in my own case at any rate not a very unusualin which the presence and the absence of a loved one become equally intolerable: at least one does not experience the pleasure in that person’s presence which, remembering how insupportable the absence seemed, was to be expected from it. The most determined philosophers are at times superstitious, and lean a little to the ominous. When we dream of a company of people, how pat to their characters do we not make them express themselves! How is it that we cannot manage to do the same when we are writing? Much reading makes a person proud and pedantic;