After a long trial, carried out with elaborate formality and great unfairness, the unhappy Joan was found guilty of proclaiming as divine visions what were delusions of the evil one, or of her own vain imagination, and when she persisted in maintaining their reality she was declared a relapsed heretic, and burnt at Rouen on the 30th of May 1431.
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.
He was arrested on the spot, and when his lodgings were searched a quantity of powder and shot was found, with the rules of a secret society, called" Young England,"whose members were pledged to meet," carrying swords and pistols and wearing crape masks."These discoveries raised the surmise that Oxford was the tool of a widespread Chartist conspiracy - or, as the Irish pretended, of a conspiracy of Orangemen to set the duke of Cumberland on the throne; and while these delusions were fresh, they threw well-disposed persons into a paroxysm of loyalty.
Fresh knowledge, new forces and faculties, have to be acquired by positive and strenuous efforts, while, on the other hand, delusions and superstitions are to be abandoned by an attitude of conscious neglect; or to use the phraseology of the Hindus, Avidyd, nescience - the mental state of the unenlightened - through which the individual energies are scattered and dissipated in futile effort, is gradually replaced by Vidyd, the higher wisdom which dispels the darkness of the mind, awakens our latent faculties and concentrates our efforts in the direction of that harmonious union, which ultimately results in Nirvana.
Another of his papers dealt with the delusions of the philosopher's stone, but nevertheless he believed that iron could be artificially formed in the combustion of vegetable matter.
