Not as a bruise to its blow

Not as a bruise to its blow, as Ryle says, are our imaginings related to our experience. Yet Hume sometimes supposes that imagination works like madness. If it can give to fiction all the appearance of reality, how is one to know what to believe when an author’s words, stirring in us like life, managing our minds with the efficiency of reality, throw Anna Karenina under the train’s wheels before our eyes?

William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, Alfred Knopf, 1970.