This belief in the power of the accused to use their invisible shapes or spectres to torture their victims had sealed the fates of those tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
And this was the fifties, the grayest, bleakest, most blinkered and culturally repressive period in the entire second half of the twentieth century, especially in small-town America.
But the phenomenon is generally thought to be exaggerated there: a toxic consequence of Confucian respect for authority and an academic system borrowed lock, stock and barrel from 19th-century Germany.
Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
It's a blindness at odds with the full measure of responsibility which sometimes, he says, involves collective responsibility or responsibilities that may flow from historic memories.