Crossword-Solution: OBSESSIONS 10 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.

Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, “fixed ideas,” so called, have thrown a flood of light on the psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions have performed the same service for that of the normal faculty of belief.

The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan.

When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self‐severity met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans‐marginal or subliminal region.

The famous reading had begun, only it was the author of “Obsessions” who now furnished the sacrifice.