248 LANGUID ARTERIAL CIRCULATION. changes; rational and light dreams being the effect of circulation of scarlet blood; dull and reasonless visions and nightmare, that of crimson or black blood. "3. The effect of this influence is recurrence of idea, memory, more or less erroneously associated, as the blood approximates to the black or scarlet state, or as the brain itself is constituted. "Now it is essential to the perfect function of the brain, not only that it shall have a due supply of blood, but that this blood shall be of that quality we term oxygenated. If there be a simple deficiency of this scarlet blood, a state of undisturbed sleep (slightly analogous to the condition of syncope, or fainting). This may be the consequence of any indirect impression, or the natural indication of that direct debility which we witness in early infancy, and in the 'second childishness and mere oblivion' of old age. But this deficiency of arterial blood may be depending on a more positive causevenous congestion, impeding its flow; for in sleep, the breathing being slower, the blood becomes essentially darker. Even arterial blood itself will become to a certain degree carbonized by lentor or stagnation. Venous congestion and diminution of arterial circulation are not incompatible; indeed, Dr. Abercombie reasons very ably on their relative nature, implying the necessity of some remora of venous circulation to supply that want or vacuum which the brain would otherwise experience from the deficiency of the current in the arterial system. Thus will the languid arterial circulation of the brain, which causes sleep in the first instance, produce secondarily, that conjestion of blood in the veins and sinuses, which shall reduce it to disturbed slumber and excite the dream. May we not account, on this principle, for the difficulty which many persons experience in falling into a second slumber, when they have been disturbed in the first ?"—Philosophy of Mystery. CHAPTER VIII. PSYCHOLOGY, ETC., OF DREAMING. PHANTASTICAL POWER OF THE SOUL. RALPH CUDWORTH, D.D. "THAT dreams are many times begotten or excited by the phantastical power of the soul itself which, as it suffers from the body, so it can likewise act upon it; and according to our customary actions or inward affections, inclinations, or desires, may move the spirits variously, and beget divers phantasms in us-is evident from the orderly connection and coherence of imaginations, which many times are continued in a long chain or series; with the fiction of interlocutory discourses and dialogues, consisting of apt answers and replies made interchangeably to one another, and contain such things as never were before printed upon the brain in such a series or order; which therefore could not proceed either from the fortuitous dancings or subsultations of the spirits, or from the determination of their motion, by antecedent prints or traces made by former sensations in the substance of the brain. "And the dreams that we have in our sleep, are really the same kind of things with those imaginations that we have many times when we are awake, when the Fancy, being not commanded or determined by the Will, roves and wanders, and runs at random; and spins out a long thread or concatenated series of imaginations or phantasms of corporeal things, quite different from those things which our outward senses at the same time take notice of. And some persons there are to whom these waking dreams are very ordinary and familiar. "And there is little doubt to be made, but if a man should suddenly fall asleep in the midst of one of these waking dreams, when his fancy is roving and spinning out such a long series of imaginations, those very imaginations and phantasms would of course become Dreams, and run on, and appear not as Phantasms or Imaginations only of things, feigned or nonexistent, but as perceptions of things really existent, that is as sensations."-Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. CERTISSIMA MORTIS IMAGO. LEOPOLD H. GRINDON. "The transplantation of our consciousness, at the period of death, from the material to the spiritual world, has its image in the suspension of our external senses during sleep, and the wakening of that mysterious sensibility of which we become conscious in certain modes of dreaming. 'We are sometimes more than ourselves in our sleep,' says Sir Thomas Browne. 'The slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason.' Strange state of being! For 'tis still to be; Senseless to feel and with closed eyes to see. "Doubtless the majority of dreams are what Macnish asserts all to be, the resuscitation of thoughts which in some shape or other have previously occupied the mind.' Experience and revelation attest, however, that at times the struggles of the chained spirit to employ, and thus to enjoy itself amid the glories of its proper clime are not in vain. Such are the occasions when strange, beautiful pictures open WHAT IS THE IMAGINATION? 251 out before our sleeping sight, rich in all the colours and reality of life. It will be said that these are creations of the imagination. Probably so. But then what is this imagination'? Barely to assign a phenomenon to the 'imagination' is to get no nearer to its cause. It is to evade the question rather tha to resolve it. The 'imagination,' as usually referred to in such matters, is just one of those useful entrenchments behind which perplexity is apt to shelter itself, and nothing more. The imagination belongs less to the material than to the spiritual world, it is the Janus bifrons of the Roman mythology, -provided with a twofold face and senses. What the populace say about imagination presenting images that we mistake for realities, is like popular philosophy in general, pure non sense. "No man ever imagined, or can imagine, anything that has not reality somewhere, and this whether waking or sleeping. That which we call imagination in reference to dreams, is what in the daytime we call our poetic faculty-and probably the play of each is in definite ratio to the other,—the prime characteristic of the faculty being unswerving allegiance to truth and fact, and one of its chief privileges, insight into the spiritual world. In sleep we are conscious of beholding objects as distinctly, and hearing sounds as plainly, as in our waking state, yet with an eye and ear wholly different from the outward organs, and which can have reference accordingly only to a sphere of nature and mode of being likewise entirely different, a sphere which can be no other than the spiritual world. Dreams, in a word, rank with the highest phenomena of the spiritual life. 'Dreams,' says Addison, 'give us some idea of the great excellence of the human soul, and its independency of matter. They are an instance of that agility and perfection which is natural to the soul when disengaged from the body. "When the organs of sense want their due repose and necessary reparation, and the body is no longer able to keep pace with the spiritual substance to which it is united, 252 DUALITY AND DISTINCTION OF SUBSTANCE. the soul exalts herself in her several faculties, and continues in action until her partner is again qualified to bear her company. Dreams look like the amusements and relaxations of the soul when she is disencumbered of her machine; her sports and pastimes when she has laid her charge asleep.' Bishop Newton's remarks on dreams are little less than argumentative for the spiritual body. 'It is very evident,' he writes, 'that the soul is in great measure independent of the body, even while she is in the body, since the deepest sleep that possesseth the one cannot affect the other, while the avenues of the bodies are closed, the soul is still endued with sense and perception, and the impressions are often stronger, and the images more lively, when we are asleep than when awake. There must necessarily be two distinct and different substances, whose nature and properties are so very different, that the one should sink under the burden and fatigue of the day, the other shall be fresh and active as the flame; while the one shall be dead to the world, the other shall be ranging the universe!' "Lord Brougham's 'Discourse of Natural Theology' contains reasoning to the same effect, and almost in the same words. A clever and interesting little book on this subject and, one which nobody curious in the phenomena of man's inner life, should fail to peruse, is Sheppard's, 'On Dreams, in their Mental and Moral Aspects. 1847.' "But leaving aside such dreams as those alluded to, even the ordinary kind claim to originate in a spiritual activity, similarly concurrent with the ligation of external sense. For the resuscitation of thoughts which in some shape or other have previously occupied the mind, is nothing more nor less than a prelude to what will unquestionably form the chief part of our intellectual experience of futurity, namely, the inalienable and irrepressible recollection of the deeds and feelings played forth while in the flesh, providing a beatitude or a misery for ever. Ordinarily, this resuscitation is of such a medley and jumbled character, that not only is the general |