(Kept in phonograph)
_25 May._--Ebb tide in appetite to-day. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so
diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty
feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth
the doing.... As I knew that the only cure for this sort of thing was
work, I went down amongst the patients. I picked out one who has
afforded me a study of much interest. He is so quaint that I am
determined to understand him as well as I can. To-day I seemed to get
nearer than ever before to the heart of his mystery.
I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making
myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing
it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep
him to the point of his madness--a thing which I avoid with the patients
as I would the mouth of hell.
(_Mem._, under what circumstances would I _not_ avoid the pit of hell?)
_Omnia Rom venalia sunt._ Hell has its price! _verb. sap._ If there be
anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards
_accurately_, so I had better commence to do so, therefore--
R. M. Renfield, tat 59.--Sanguine temperament; great physical strength;
morbidly excitable; periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which I
cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the
disturbing influence end in a mentally-accomplished finish; a possibly
dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution
is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves. What I think of
on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is
balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed
point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of
accidents can balance it.
_Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Hon. Arthur Holmwood._
_25 May._
My dear Art,--
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