FASCINATION 157
subject of fascination will say, ‘1 believe what I have been told to believe by the persons 1 trust; in other words, I believe because it suits me to believe. I believe because I love certain persons and certain things.’ Here we may find him using various touchin phrases which prove nothing, such as ‘The faith of our Fathers, My Mother’s Cross.’ In other words, the first says ‘My beliefs stem from reason, while the second says My beliefs are governed by fascination.’
To believe on the word of others is something which is permis.siblc and even advisable ior children. If you reply that Bossuet, Pascal and Fénelon were great men and yet they believed in manifest absurdities, I shall answer that 1 find it hard to take this view but that even if it were true it would only prove that these great men behaved like children in some instances.
Pascal, we are told, constantly saw a pit yawning in front of him. It seems to me, without any disrespect to Pascal s genius. that there is no need to believe in his pit; the man who is fascinated loses his free will altogether and falls completely under the domination of the fascinator. Although his reason functions perfectly for neutral subjects, it changes absolutely into a state of folly as soon as you try to correct the things which have been suggested to him. He only sees and hears through the eyes and ears of those who are dominating him. Let him touch the truth and he will maintain that what he touches does not exist. On the contrary, he believes that he sees and touches the impossibility which has been affirmed to him. Saint Ignatius composed certain spiritual exercises for cultivating this kind of fascination in his disciples. He laid it down that every day the Jesuit novice should retire to a dark and silent place and employ his imagination in creating a perceptible representation o( the mysteries, that he should try to see, and indeed see as real, all the nightmares of Saint Anthony and all the horrors of Hell in a voluntary and waking dream imposed on a wearied brain. During such exercises the heart hardens and atrophies from terror, the reason totters and dies. Ignanus has destroyed the man but has made a Jesuit, and the whole world will not be as strong as this formidable android.
Nothing is as implacable as a robot. Once it has been set going it will not stop until you have smashed it.
What Loyola did was to create thousands of robots which
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