They were in fact, as I have already tried to show, a view of the political and moral situation of Italy, expressed with the force of profound religious conviction and based upon a theory of the divine government of the world.

But now far he allowed himself to be guided by visions and by words uttered to his soul in trance, is a somewhat different question.
It is just at this point that a man possessed of acute insight and trusting to the truth of his instincts may be tempted under strong devotional excitement to pass the border land which separates healthy intuition from hallucination.

If Savonarola's studies of the Hebrew prophets inclined him to believe in dreams and revelations, yet on the other hand the strong logic of his intellect, trained in scholastic distinctions, taught him to mistrust the promptings of a power that spoke to him when he was somewhat more or less than his prosaic self.
How could he be sure that the spirit came from God?
We know for certain that he struggled against the impulse of divination and refused at times to obey it.

But it overcame him.

Like the Cassandra of AEschylus, he panted in the grasp of one mightier than himself.