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 phantasmis 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?

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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 ge 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.

666

"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

VIVID REMINISCENCE.

253

product unintelligible, but the particular incidents are themselves too fragmentary, and dislocated to be recognized. But it is not always so. There must be few who have not experienced in their sleep, with what peculiar vividness unknown in their waking hours, and with what minute exactitude of portraiture, events long past and long lost sight of, will not infrequently come back, showing that there is something within that never forgets, and which only waits the negation of the external world, to leap up and certify its powers.

O wondrous Dreamland! who hath not

Threaded some mystic maze

In its dim retreats, and lived again
In the light of other days?

There the child is on its mother's breast

That long in the grave hath lain;

For in Dreamland all the loved and lost
Are given us again.

"In the whole compass of poetry, perhaps there is nothing more touching than the allusion in the 'Exile of Erin :'—

Erin! my country, though sad and forsaken,
In dreams I revisit thy sea-beaten shore;
But alas! in a far foreign land I am taken,

And sigh for the friends I shall never see more!

"That which so vividly remembers is the soul; and if in

"Martineau carries out this view, in a piece of great power, in the Endeavours after the Christian Life,' vol. i. Coleridge, in the 'Biographia Literaria,' vol. i. p. 115. ed. 1817, suggests that the 'books' which will be opened at the last day, are men's own perfect memories of what they have thought and done during life. In relation to the quickening of the memory at death, it is full of solemn interest that persons so nearly drowned as to lose all consciousness and all sens of physical pain, see during the moments preceding their restoration the whole of their past life in mental panorama. Of this there are many well-known instances on record. Forgetting, absolute forgetting, asserts De Quincey, is a thing not possible to the human mind."

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IMPORTANCE OF BODILY HEALTH.

sleep, which refreshes our organic nature, it utters its recollections brokenly and indistinctly, it will abundantly compensate itself when the material vesture which clogs it shall be cast away.

"Much of the indistinctness of dreams probably arises from physical unhealthiness. If a sound body be one of the first requirements to a sound mind, in relation to its waking employments, no less must it be needful to the sanity and precision of its sleeping ones. Brilliant as are the powers and functions of the spiritual body, the performance of them, whether sleeping or waking, so long as it is invested with flesh and blood, is immensely, perhaps wholly, contingent on the health of the material body. If the material body be improperly fed, or the blood be insufficiently oxygenated, the brain and nerves are imperfectly nourished, and the spiritual body can but imperfectly enact its will. However little it may be suspected, the great practical question of our day—the health of towns-thus involves, in a less or greater extent, the moral and intellectual interests of the community. For a soul that is debarred from acting freely and vigorously, through a defective or vitiated condition of its instruments, cannot be expected to act nobly or religiously."-Life: its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena.

CONSPECTUS OF OPINIONS.

"A conspectus of the opinions held by those who have investigated the psychical aspect of sleep, and in a philosophical spirit, may present it in the various lights of which it is susceptible. Leibnitz argues that even when we sleep without dreaming, there is always present some faint perception. Sir W. Hamilton unfortunately attempts to prove the postulate by reference to somnambulism. Kant argued that we always dream when we sleep; that those who fancy they have not, dreamt, have only forgotten their dreams, and that to cease