offer various examples.
His person becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for
a time simply waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch
of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that
one as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their
inhibitions away. The fury of his comrades' charge, once entered on,
will give this pitch of courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout
will give this pitch of fear. In these sovereign excitements, things
ordinarily impossible grow natural because the inhibitions are
annulled. Their "no! no!" not only is not heard, it does not exist.
Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops to the circus rider--no
impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they make.

"Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!" cries the grenadier,
frantic over his Emperor's capture, when his wife and babes are
suggested; and men pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut
their way through the crowd with knives.[144]

[144] "'Love would not be love,' says Bourget, 'unless it could carry
one to crime.' And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable
passion unless it could carry one to crime." (Sighele: Psychollogie
des sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annul the ordinary
inhibitions set by "conscience." And conversely, of all the criminal
human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who
actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may not
be at some moment overpowered by the presence of some other emotion to
which his character is also potentially liable, provided that other
emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is usually the most
available emotion for this result in this particular class of persons.
It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a
"higher affection." If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of
judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put our moral house in
order--we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us!
Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear
its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full
conversion value.

One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the
composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive
power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere
irascibility, susceptibility to wrath,