io2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



subject after she had passed a few minutes in the syncope already 

 described. She then returned to ordinary somnambulism, but Lucie 

 2 could not tell me a word of what had happened to Lucie 3, and sup- 

 posed she had been asleep and said nothing." Thus we have the 

 same difference between two successive stages of somnambulism as 

 between the dream and the waking state. But as the stages 2 and 3 

 are evidently of the same nature, so we have a right to suppose that 

 the dream and the waking, whose phenomena as to each other are 

 similar, are likewise of the same nature. 



In the ordinary experience of mankind we do not awake from 

 our normal condition; but is it proved that there is never any awaken- 

 ing, any third state into which we may pass? The supposition of 

 some such state into which we pass by death is one of the funda- 

 mentals of nearly all religions; and in this sense we might contem- 

 plate the possibility of an awakening in which we shall be astonished 

 at having given ourselves up so completely to the world of sense, at 

 having taken a passing state for the definite one, an ephemeral world 

 for the sole and absolute world, a provisional existence for the 

 real one. 



Even among men as we find them, we see some making an ap- 

 proach to a third state, if not living in it. What is science but the 

 revelation of a new world, different from the visible one? When we 

 see light and colors, they tell us of an invisible ether with particles 

 vibrating with almost incalculable rapidity; when we hear faint or 

 loud sounds, sharp or grave, they tell of the more or less ample and 

 rapid vibrations of matter. When we perceive a multiple or varied 

 reality, it shows us the single phenomenon of motion. These formu- 

 las do not, however, signify, as some mistake, that light, color, and 

 sound do not exist, but that there is something else; and that if we 

 could gain new senses, a new universe would open out to us. This 

 means, simply, that the scientific man is already half waked up from 

 his ordinary life, and has half entered a new world. 



Metaphysics is a waking up of this kind. A metaphysician who 

 really believes his doctrines, like Plato or Spinoza, is already liv- 

 ing in a new world and contemplating the supposed reality in which 

 we are still immersed as a matter of indifference away off in the 

 dim twilight. To him, what we regard as reality is only appear- 

 ance, while the eternal rain of atoms or the play of immaterial 

 forces, or whatever he supposes the world to be made of, is the true 

 reality. 



Religion is another such awakening, and to the devout man this 

 life is only a provisional one, a trial, the prelude to the true life; 

 and while he may regard the world of sense as real too, he looks 

 forward to the superior reality, which it is the privilege of the elect 



