He believed in the devil, whom he regarded as a kind of evil genius,[1] and he imagined, like all the world, that nervous maladies were produced by demons who possessed the patient and agitated him.

The marvellous was not the exceptional for him; it was his normal state.
The notion of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, is coincident with the birth of experimental science.

The man who is strange to all ideas of physical laws, who believes that by praying he can change the path of the clouds, arrest disease, and even death, finds nothing extraordinary in miracle, inasmuch as the entire course of things is to him the result of the free will of the Divinity.

This intellectual state was constantly that of Jesus.

But in his great soul such a belief produced effects quite opposed to those produced on the vulgar.