There is only this
difference that, with people of education among us, even in such
short intervals of illusion or abandon, any extravagance in acting,
or flagrant improbability in the fiction, destroys the charm, breaks
the spell by which we have been so mysteriously bound, stops the
smooth current of sympathetic emotion, and restores us to reason and
to the realities of ordinary life. With the Hindoos, on the contrary,
the greater the improbability, the more monstrous and preposterous
the fiction, the greater is the charm it has over their minds;[9] and
the greater their learning in the Sanskrit the more are they under
the influence of this charm. Believing all to be written by the
Deity, or by his inspiration, and the men and things of former days
to have been very different from the men and things of the present
day, and the heroes of these fables to have been demigods, or people
endowed with powers far superior to those of the ordinary men of
their own day, the analogies of nature are never for a moment
considered; nor do questions of probability, or possibility,
according to those analogies, ever obtrude to dispel the charm with
which they are so pleasingly bound.
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