284 HUMANISM 



XV 



passes into a region of higher reality ; on the other, he passes 

 away out of the dream-world that imposed itself upon 

 him into his waking life. 1 For we have seen that even 

 dreams are not entirely unreal. Even at their lowest, the 

 features they present refer to the truth, and foreshadow 

 the reality, of a superior world : they are to some extent 

 veridical. Hence we must contemplate the situation also 

 from the point of view of the beings who interacted with 

 the dreamer in the dream life and world. For them, his 

 awakening means his withdrawal from their world. When 

 Alice awakes, she of course declares Looking-Glass Land 

 to have been a dream, and its inhabitants to have been the 

 creatures of her fancy. But while she was with them they 

 were vividly real. And Alice, after all, herself was not quite 

 satisfied with this vulgar explanation. It will be remem 

 bered that she suspected the black kitten of having trans 

 formed herself into the Red Queen of Looking-Glass Land. 

 And this would raise an interesting question : if we should 

 chance to survive death, should we merely declare earth- 

 life to have been unreal, or should we trace in its happen 

 ings some subtle presage of a fuller truth ? 



It seems quite worth while, therefore, to look at the 

 situation from the point of view of Looking-Glass Land, to 

 whose denizens it would appear quite different. Tweedle- 

 dee, no very cogent reasoner, perhaps, but a thorough 

 going idealistic monist in his argument, asseverated that 

 the dream was not Alice s at all, but the Red King s, and 

 that if and when he left off dreaming her, the phenomenon 

 called Alice would simply disappear. His notion as to 

 the manner of her disappearance was that she would &quot; go 

 out bang ! just like a candle,&quot; but herein he may have 

 been mistaken. Still he has at least suggested to us that 

 when one of us withdraws from a world, the world may 

 misinterpret his action as his death. 



Now death is a topic on which philosophers have been 

 astonishingly commonplace. The reason of this cannot 

 have been that it was not a splendid topic for reflection, 

 nor yet that their doctrines were not capable of throwing 



1 Cp. p. 39. 



