368 HUMANISM xix 



another world our terrestrial life may appear as grotesque 

 a parody, as misleading a distortion, of true reality as the 

 most preposterous of dreams. 



Nay more ; even in this life we cannot call it an illicit 

 and unthinkable ambition to discover modes of rising from 

 our waking world to one of a higher order, whose superior 

 reality would demand acknowledgment from all so soon 

 as either its experience had become communicable to an 

 appreciable fraction of society, or it had proved to be of 

 use for the purposes of waking life. 1 Philosophy could 

 not indeed provide the Columbus of such idealist discovery. 

 But it might sanction his assumption of such risks. Just 

 as an enlightened physics might have contended, long before 

 Magellan, that the earth was circumnavigable if it could 

 find the daring soul to sail right round it, so philosophy 

 may declare that if the whole world be experience, new 

 worlds may be found by psychical transformation as 

 probably and validly as by physical transportation. And 

 it must decline to treat the fact that the other worlds 

 we know are apparently less real than that of waking life 2 

 as being a conclusive proof that more real worlds are 

 nowhere to be found. 



Thus the passage from world to world is familiar 

 enough to our experience. But, as experienced by us in 

 sleep, it is not irrevocable. We return, that is, to the 

 same waking world. And that makes a difference 

 between sleep and its twin brother death. For from 

 death we are bidden to believe that there is no return. 

 Still we must not exaggerate the difference ; for to our 

 dream-worlds also we do not (usually) return. 



Hence this return, which is regarded as an awakening 

 of the soul from the point of view of the subject of the 

 experience, is at the same time the dissolution of his dream 

 world and life. The severance of his relations with the 

 world of his former experience, therefore, has a double 



1 Cp. p. 41. 



2 A remark subject always to certain reservations on the score of the subjective 

 worlds of the mystics and founders of religions. Common sense hardly realizes 

 how its principles here cut away the foundations of all the religions which, never 

 theless, it imagines itself to value and believe. Cp. p. 114 note. 



