But even the most casual observer could see that the girl,
enormously upset by her family troubles, had hallucinated a complete
fiction out of one external fact, a remembered superstition, and a
turmoil of remorse, and fear and love for her father.
Abnormality in these instances is only a matter of degree. When an
Attorney-General, who has been frightened by a bomb exploded on his
doorstep, convinces himself by the reading of revolutionary literature
that a revolution is to happen on the first of May 1920, we recognize
that much the same mechanism is at work. The war, of course, furnished
many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative
imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a
counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive
response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men
respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in
many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they
respond. Let him cast the first stone who did not believe in the
Russian army that passed through England in August, 1914, did not
accept any tale of atrocities without direct proof, and never saw a
plot, a traitor, or a spy where there was none. Let him cast a stone
who never passed on as the real inside truth what he had heard someone
say who knew no more than he did.
In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor.
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