"
"I suppose, poor fellow, he is not in a fit state to be reasoned
with?"
"On the contrary, like all men with a fixed delusion, he has
plenty of intelligence to appeal to on every point, except the
one point on which he is wrong. I have argued with him vainly by
the hour together. He possesses, unfortunately, an acute nervous
sensibility and a vivid imagination; and besides, he has, as I
suspect, been superstitiously brought up as a child. It would be
probably useless to argue rationally with him on certain
spiritual subjects, even if his mind was in perfect health. He
has a good deal of the mystic and the dreamer in his composition;
and science and logic are but broken reeds to depend upon with
men of that kind."
"Does he merely listen to you when you reason with him, or does
he attempt to answer?"
"He has only one form of answer, and that is, unfortunately, the
most difficult of all to dispose of. Whenever I try to convince
him of his delusion, he invariably retorts by asking me for a
rational explanation of what happened to him at the masked ball.
Now, neither you nor I, though we believe firmly that he has been
the dupe of some infamous conspiracy, have been able as yet to
penetrate thoroughly into this mystery of the Yellow Mask. Our
common sense tells us that he must be wrong in taking his view of
it, and that we must be right in taking ours; but if we cannot
give him actual, tangible proof of that--if we can only theorize,
when he asks us for an explanation--it is but too plain, in his
present condition, that every time we remonstrate with him on the
subject we only fix him in his delusion more and more firmly.
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