252 Essay on Dreaming, including 



If any of your correspondents could furnish you with these do- 

 cuments, I feel assured that you would most readily make room 

 for their insertion in the pages of your Magazine. 



XLII. An Essay on Dreaming, including Conjectures on the 

 proximate Cause of Sleep. By Andrew Carmichael, 

 M.R.I.A.* 



XIreams have perplexed every individual who has attempted to 

 account for them ; but it will scarcely be credited that a philo- 

 sopher of the eighteenth century, who was acquainted with the 

 opinions of Locke and had controverted with ability the theory 

 of Berkeley, should find no other mode of explaining these phae- 

 nomena, than by maintaining that "our dreams are prompted 

 by separate immaterial beings f ;" and in illustration of the na- 

 ture of uneasy dreams during illness, could argue that " these 

 beings wait for and catch the opportunity of the indisposition of 

 the body, to represent at the same time something terrifying also 

 to the mind J." 



But to arrive at a more rational explication, we must revert to 

 this author's predecessors. " Dreaming (says Locke) is the 

 having of ideas (whilst the outward senses are stopped, so that 

 they receive not outward objects with their usual quickness) in 

 the mind, not suggested by any external objects or known occa- 

 sion, nor under any choice or conduct of the understanding at 

 all§ ;" and again, " this I would willingly be satisfied in, whether 

 the soul when it thinks thus apart, and as it were separate froni 

 the lody, acts less rationally than when conjointly with it, or no? 

 If its separate thoughts be less rational, then these men must say 

 that the soul owes the perfection oi rational thinking to the lody : 

 if it does not, it is a wonder that our dreams should be for the 

 most part so frivolous and irrational, and that the soul should 

 retain none of its more rational soliloquies and meditations || .'* 

 We might almost imagine that this passage was composed in 

 support of the Organic Theory since developed by Gall, Some 

 feeble anticipation of such a system seems to have been floating 

 in the mind of Locke. 



* From the Transactions of the King's and Queen's College of Physicians 

 in Ireland. 



+ An Inquiry into the Nature of the human Soul, wherein the Immate- 

 riality of the Soul is evinced from the Principles of Reason and Philosophy. 

 Anon.^no date — p. 215. 



X Id. 257. I have lately found that this is the first edition of Baxter's ce- 

 lebrated Essay. 



§ Locke's Essay, 2lst edition, vol. 1, P- 213. \\ Id. p. 87. 



Hartley 



