thought of as an “horrible imagining,” and an indication that the supernatural soliciting was evil in its nature. “This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill; cannot be good —If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth I am thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature ? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man, that function Is smother'd in surmise ; and nothing is, But what is not.”
Let not this early and important testimony be overlooked, which Macbeth gives to the extreme excitability of his imagi nation. The supernatural soliciting of the weird Sisters suggests to him an image, not a thought merely, but an image so horrible that its contemplation “does unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature.”
This passage was scarcely intended to describe an actual hal lucination, but rather that excessive predominance of the
imaginative faculty which enables some men to call at will before the mind's eye, the very appearance of the object of thought ; that faculty which enabled a great painter to place at will in the empty chair of his studio the mental delineation of any person who had given him one sitting. It is a faculty bordering on a morbid state, and apt to pass the limit, when judgment swallowed in surmise yields her function, and the imaginary becomes to the mind as real as the true, “and
nothing is, but what is not.” This early indication of Mac beth's tendency to hallucination is most important in the psychological development of his character. We cannot believe that Macbeth had entertained any idea
