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Quotation from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
“When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood”
A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Sect. 10 (Project Gutenberg #4705)
Hume explains madness as an excess of the same vivacity that ordinarily constitutes belief, so that fiction and memory become indistinguishable.
Citation: "When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood" — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Sect. 10 (Project Gutenberg #4705). (id a-treatise-of-human-nature-q2)
Portrait: David Hume, Allan Ramsay, Public domain.
