MAURY OX SLEEP AXD DREAMS. 401 



study of which, under its many anomalies in health 

 and disease, in its sleeping as well as waking moods 

 carries us further into the mystery of the mind itself 

 than we can reach by any other approach. That there 

 is a certain material mechanism of memory, an or- 

 ganisation upon which impressions are made and re- 

 tained, the facts compel us to believe. Whether we 

 shall ever acquire a more intimate knowledge of its 

 nature is very doubtful. The minute anatomy of the 

 human brain and its appendages, while disclosing much 

 that is curious in structure and in relation to the senses 

 and vital organs, has failed to detect any apparatus of 

 memory, or those conditions which make recollection 

 an act of the human will. 



Ignorant here, we are still able to affirm that the 

 memory and the recollection (ftz/Tj/xT/, avd^rjcr^ ; the 

 faculty and the act) are strictly analogous in their ap- 

 plication to the visions of the night as to the events of 

 the day. In each case the recollection works its back- 

 ward way through the successive antecedent states of 

 the sensorium ; guided by the same associations, and 

 stopped by the same impediments. Anyone caring to 

 examine his own consciousness on the subject will see 

 how similar the process is in kind, though, as regards 

 the dream, rendered more partial and perplexing by 

 the other conditions of sleep. 



But we may carry this analogy on to another point. 

 Many anecdotes are familiar to us, and these sanctioned 

 by individual observation, showing how much and 

 what variety of thought, emotion, and event may be 

 comprised in a dream of the briefest duration. The 



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