732 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ness to the fact that our intelligence is often but a tool in the hands 

 of our emotions.* 



I have had frequent occasion to refer to the objectivation of sub- 

 jective sensations as a phenomenon of dreaming. It is, indeed, so 

 frequent and so important a phenomenon that it needs some further 

 reference. In hysteria (which by some of the most recent authorities, 

 like Sollier, is regarded as a species of somnambulism), in " demon- 

 possession," and many other abnormal phenomena it is well known 

 that there is, as it were, a doubling of personality; the ego is split up 

 into two or more parts, each of which may act as a separate personality. 

 The literature of morbid psychology is full of extraordinary and 

 varied cases exhibiting this splitting up of personality. But it is 

 usually forgotten that in dreams the doubling of personality is a 

 normal and constant phenomenon in all healthy people. In dream- 

 ing we can divide our body between ourselves and another person. 

 Thus a medical friend dreamed that in conversation with a lady 

 patient he found his hand resting on her knee and was unable to re- 

 move it; awakening in horror from this unprofessional situation he 

 found his own hand firmly clasped between his knees; the hand had 

 remained his own, the knee had become another person's, the hand 

 being claimed, rather than the knee, on account of its greater tactile 

 sensibility. Again, we sometimes objectify our own physical dis- 

 comforts felt during sleep in the emotions of some other person, or 

 even in some external situations. And, possibly, every dream in 

 which there is any dramatic element is an instance of the same split- 

 ting up of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or 

 confusion from the rebuke or the arguments of other persons, but the 

 persons who administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still 

 ourselves. 



When we consider that this dream process, with its perpetual 

 dramatization of our own personality, has been going on as long as 

 man has been man — and probably much longer, for it is evident that 

 animals dream — it is impossible to overestimate its immense influence 

 on human belief. Men's primitive conceptions of religion, of morals, 

 of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more ex- 

 ceptional phenomena, have certainly been influenced by this constant 

 dream experience. It is the universal primitive explanation of ab- 

 normal psychic and even physical phenomena that some other person 

 or spirit is Avorking within the subject of the abnormal experience. 

 Certainly dreaming is* not the sole source of such conceptions, but 



* It may be added that they also present evidence — to which attention has not, I 

 believe, been previously called — in support of the James-Lange or physiological theory of 

 emotion, according to which the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not 

 the result of the emotion. 



