THE EXTERNAL WORLD 95 



" Look out ! ' and we find we are on the point of being 

 killed by a motor-car ; we therefore attribute the words 

 we heard to the person in question having seen the motor- 

 car first, in which case there are existing things of which 

 we are not directly conscious. But this whole scene, with 

 our inference, may occur in a dream, in which case the 

 inference is generally considered to be mistaken. Is 

 there anything to make the argument from analogy more 

 cogent when we are (as we think) awake ? 



The analogy in waking life is only to be preferred to 

 that in dreams on the ground of its greater extent and 

 consistency. If a man were to dream every night about 

 a set of people whom he never met by day, who had 

 consistent characters and grew older with the lapse of 

 years, he might, like the man in Calderon's play, find it 

 difficult to decide which was the dream-world and which 

 was the so-called "real" world. It is only the failure of 

 our dreams to form a consistent whole either with each 

 other or with waking life that makes us condemn them. 

 Certain uniformities are observed in waking life, while 

 dreams seem quite erratic. The natural hypothesis would 

 be that demons and the spirits of the dead visit us while 

 we sleep ; but the modern mind, as a rule, refuses to 

 entertain this view, though it is hard to see what could 

 be said against it. On the other hand, the mystic, in 

 moments of illumination, seems to awaken from a sleep 

 which has filled all his mundane life : the whole world 

 of sense becomes phantasmal, and he sees, with the clarity 

 and convincingness that belongs to our morning realisa- 

 tion after dreams, a world utterly different from that of 

 our daily cares and troubles. Who shall condemn him ? 

 Who shall justify him ? Or who shall justify the seeming 

 solidity of the common objects among which we suppose 

 ourselves to live ? 



