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Chapter 9
If it weren\'t for Kirchoff\'s testimony I\'d say Ned Minton had gone raving crazy," I declared as the door closed on our visitors. "The whole thing\'s wilder than an opium smoker\'s dream—that meeting with the girl in New Orleans, the snake that comes and disappears, the assignation in the cemetery—it\'s all too preposterous. But I know Kirchoff. He\'s as unimaginative as a side of sole-leather, and as efficient as he is unimaginative. If he says Minton\'s dog died of snake-bite that\'s what it died of, but the whole affair\'s so utterly fantastic——"

"Agreed," de Grandin nodded; "but what is fantasy but the appearance of mental images as such, severed from ordinary relations? The \'ordinary relations\' of images are those to which we are accustomed, which conform to our experience. The wider that experience, the more ordinary will we find extraordinary relations. By example, take yourself: You sit in a dark auditorium and see a railway train come rushing at you. Now, it is not at all in ordinary experience for a locomotive to come dashing in a theater filled with people, it is quite otherwise; but you keep your seat, you do not flinch, you are not frightened. It is nothing but a motion picture, which you understand. But if you were a savage from New Guinea you would rise and fly in panic from this steaming, shrieking iron monster which bears down on you. Tiens, it is a matter of experience, you see. To you it is an everyday event, to the savage it would be a new and terrifying thing.

"Or, perhaps, you are at the hospital. You place a patient between you and the Crookes\' tube of an X-ray, you turn on the current, you observe him through the fluoroscope and pouf! his fle............
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