Meaning that horror, as a feeling, can survive only so long as the person subjected to the phenomenon that is inducing it persists in a kind of imaginative fugue, wherein the facts of a situation are overwhelmed, and made insensible, by the associations (irrational, but not unfounded) that the individual brings to the processing of those facts, and that can cause that person to almost lose their wits, and to succumb to a paralysis of the will.