There is a most formidable and estimable _insane_ taste. The will has
great though indirect power over the taste, just as it has over the
belief. There are some horrid beliefs from which human nature revolts,
from which at first it shrinks, to which at first no effort can force
it. But if we fix the mind upon them, they have a power over us, just
because of their natural offensiveness. They are like the sight of human
blood. Experienced soldiers tell us that at first, men are sickened by
the smell and newness of blood, almost to death and fainting; but that
as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as
they _will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to
gloat on carnage, to love blood (at least for the moment) with a deep,
eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive
aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane
attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men fall
into the worst delusions. They will not let their mind alone; they force
it toward some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of
intellect recommends: and nature punishes their disregard of her warning
by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so, the most
industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to
rest in their instinctive natural horror; they overcome it, and angry
nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to
detestable stanzas.