ON DREAMS.

CHAPTER I.

PLACE OF DREAMS IN SYSTEMS OF DIVINATION.

THERE is, perhaps, in human nature no instinct more characteristically human than that which shrinks from isolation. The old physical formula to the effect that nature abhors a vacuum, might, by the easiest of transitions, be capable of a civil adaptation. Every one, from Adam to Campbell's Last Man, with Cowper's Alexander Selkirk for a middle term,Timon of Athens only excepted, and he questionably-rather than be alone in a depopulated world, would endure to live in a society to which he was bound only by the ties of a universal antipathy. Even on the amiable hypothesis that man is a beast of prey, it is evident that it is necessary for him to be within reach of his quarry: that he must be gregarious, if only in fulfilment of his tendencies to predacity. Such a supposition enables us to state the case in the strongest possible manner; for if a social attraction even of antagonism be admitted, there is no difficulty in establishing an à fortiori argument whenever the attraction of cohesion is agitated,-whenever, that is, regard is had to man from the brighter and softer side of his character and disposition.

But amongst the necessities of man's nature, there is that

4

GRAVITATION TO THE INFINITE.

of still another fellowship. He may be gregarious; but he is the object of longings which cannot be appeased by the sympathy, or indeed by the society, if that were possible, of the aggregate of the race. His social life may be satisfactory; his relations to his kindred and his fellow-citizens may be kindly and complete; but amidst social and family completeness and satisfaction, he is conscious, by reason of his proper will and personality, of a magnificent loneliness. There are one or two important senses in which every man is the only man in the universe. Each is cut off from his kind, while still in their midst, as ship is severed from ship in mid-ocean; or as an insular star that, across the unphenomenal wastes of space, remotely twinkles to its fellows. Yet, as the orbs of heaven gravitate in their motions towards the central and dominant lord of their system, so does man gravitate, not only towards something of kin to himself or greater than himself, but towards something which is infinitely inclusive of himself and all his peers.

There is, then, in man an attraction to the mysterious and the comprehensive which could not be satisfied even if, in the fruition of a sublime incontinence, he throbbed with every heart, swelled with every wave, or shared the tiny pulsations of every leaf. 'Man," says Protagoras, "is the measure of the universe;" and this boast is half a truth, for man is a little greater than anything or everything in the material world that he can imagine. He chafes at every hypothetical limitation. The universe in its entirety may be beyond him; but he knows that he can penetrate beyond every conceivable part thereof. And for the rest, whilst in the sphere of extension he is forced to introduce negations into his vocabulary, and to confess the Indefinite, the Boundless, the Infinite,-in the sphere of morals and ontology he can still find affirmative vocables, and call the Infinite by the determinate names of the Self-existent, the Creator, the Disposer, the Good.

Nothing less than a felt if inexplicable relation to this Being, whom he can realize if not understand—apprehend if

not comprehend-will satisfy the aspirations of his nature. The divine remoteness and insouciance of Epicurus and Lord Herbert of Cherbury can never be satisfactory to the general heart, which, out of a postulated God, will, as the Stoics recognized, by its own imperative logic, compel a Providence. Man will not deify law and statistics, but in a created universe demands to be placed en rapport with the Creator. If he has a father, he will not abdicate the privileges of being the recognized offspring of that father. He is no foundling, and declines to be nurtured on the lap of circumstance. "The wise may, indeed,” says says Dio Chrysostom in his twelfth Oration, -"the wise may, indeed, adore the gods as being far from us; but there exists in all men an eager longing to adore and worship the gods as nigh. For as children, torn from father and mother, feel a powerful and affectionate longing, often stretch out their hands after their absent parents, and often dream of them,—so the man who heartily loves the gods for their benevolence towards us and their relationship with us, desires to be continually near them, and to have intercourse with them; so that many barbarians, ignorant of the arts, have called the very mountains and trees gods, that they might recognize them as nearer to themselves." We are aware that the particular office for which the Greek rhetorician used the pathetic assertion just quoted was one in extenuation or explanation of the popular tendency to stay the devout recognition of the gods through symbols and statues, at an idolatry which consisted in a worship that went no further than the divine representatives. But the truth is a general one, and to our purpose. The problem was to bring the gods nigh, within the ken and the habitude of the daily thought and experience of mankind; to realize their rule and governance; to observe the facts of their interference, and inductively to discover the laws by which they manifested their will and purposes.

A solution of this problem had from the first been given to mankind; the intimacy in the beginning had been so close as

L

6

REVELATION AND ITS SUBSTITUTES.

to be described in our Holy Writings as a face-to-face communion. Later, after the cessation of this most intimate communion, a revelation had been accorded, which, dawning in cloud and mist, went on to the clearness and lustre of noontide, -a revelation which, at its source narrow and shallow, flowed on, ever increasing in breadth and profundity as the mind of man was educated, opened up and opened out, to receive it. The greater part of the ancient world, however, impatient of the moral restraints and penalties which were the conditions of its enjoyment, cast themselves adrift at once from its duties and its privileges. Still the necessity remained of keeping up, on some terms or other, the connection between heaven and earth. If the contemned celestial light were withdrawn, it must be approximately compensated by a Promethean theft of fire. If the ladder of angelic descent and ascent were folded up, tentative scaling-ladders, which the bitter experience of ages demonstrated to be too short by at least a hair's breadth, were to be planted in the direction of the sky. Thus, throughout the Gentile world, in the place of Revelation, which was God's method of exhibiting his plans from above, arose the art and practice of divination, which was man's method of peering into them from below.

But also with the people amongst whom, on account of a peculiar favour rather than a peculiar desert, the line of successive revelations was kept unbroken, there arose an impatience for indications more circumstantially minute and practical than were consistent with the terms of a revelation which had principally to do with things of principal interest; and which, laying down general laws and insisting upon general moral sequences, left particular cases to be solved, in the light of these and with the guidance of the individual conscience, by a less or more painful process of ratiocination. From this process the sluggish or stupid Jew recoiled; and as the Gentile had set up Divination as a succedaneous revelation, so the Jew erected it as a subsidiary or supplementary

one.

Both Jew and Gentile agreed in this that it was con

PRINCIPAL CLASSES OF DIVINERS.

venient to have a hack Providence, which would work to order in imperial trappings, and not refuse to swink in any the most vulgar of hayband harness.

If a coop of consecrated chickens, martyrs to the pip or to neuralgia, were off their feed, it was divinely intimated that two impatient fleets were to ride an inactive burden on the weighted tide; or that the swords and spears of serried thousands were to rest upon the tented field inglorious and unstained. If a city were engulphed in the undistended maw of an earthquake, or the life of a district consigned to seething petrifaction by the hideous ruin and combustion of volcanic lava-if through the opened casements of Inferno strange fires flashed as lightning over half a cowering world; or if clouds of night, mutually defiant, crashed and bellowed forth a thundering remonstrance, it was divinely insinuated that it would be prudent for some snivelling goatherd and whimpering shepherdess to forego the day that should give them the right of tending, without scandel, their savoury cattle in Divination is easily recognized, in such examples as these, as a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine of a particular providence.

common.

Mention is made in the Scriptures (Deuteronomy xviii. 10, 11, and elsewhere), of nine principal kinds of divination, against which the Jews-who had become tainted with the superstitions of Egypt, a country which served also as the school of the Western world in the abstruse and occult sciences—were especially to be upon their guard. (1.) The first of these was founded on the inspection of the planets, stars, and clouds. It is familiar to us as judicial or apotelesmatic astrology; and its professors were named by Moses meonen, from anan, a cloud. (2.) The practisers of the second are called by Moses menacheseh, a term for which the Vulgate and the generality of interpreters have given augur as an equivalent. (3.) The masters of the third are called mecascheph, a term of which the Septuagint and Vulgate equivalents bear that they were men given to evil practices. (4.) The