Explore "The Lunatic" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Those who are interested in what simple straightforward people call the / Pathology of Consciousness have gathered a great body of evidence upon / the various manias that affect men, and there is an especially / interesting department of this which concerns illusion upon matters / which in the sane are determinable by the senses and common experience. / Thus one man will believe himself to be the Emperor of China, another / to be William Shakespeare or some other impossible person, though one / would imagine that his every accident of daily life would convince him / to the contrary.
I had recently occasion to watch one of the most harmless and yet one / of the most striking of these illusions in a private asylum which has / specialized, if I may so express myself, upon men of letters. The case / was harmless and even benign, for the poor fellow was not of a / combative disposition to begin with, was of too careful and dignified a / temperament to show more than slight irritation if his delusion were / contradicted. This misfortune, however, very rarely overtook him, for / those who came to visit him were warned to humour his whim. This / eccentricity I will now describe.