836 Dynamic Theory. 



we take it in as it were by sentences. If the meaning is a little ob- 

 scure, we scan the words and observe their separate meanings, and get 

 at the idea by words. If the words are new, we observe the letters of 

 which they are composed and build up the meaning of the writer from 

 the minutest elements. ' ' In like manner an expert calculator will cast 

 his eye rapidly from the bottom to the top of a column of figures and 

 will name the total without any conscious appreciation of the value of 

 each individual figure. " (Carpenter). After we have had a subject 

 under consideration for a time, then turned our attention from it, and 

 after an interval returned to it again, we find it presenting new aspects, 

 of the cerebral process for the attainment of which we have been en- 

 tirely unconscious. The subject has often become cleared of difficulties 

 in this unconscious process, which did not yield while conscious atten- 

 tion was directed to them. Emotional processes are automatic as well 

 as those denominated intellectual. Both attractions and aversions are 

 formed in an entirely insensible manner, and take complete possession 

 of a person before he knows it. 



Numerous cases could be cited of intelligent cerebral action taking 

 place during the unconsciousness of sleep. 



A gentleman related the following to Carpenter: " My father, when 

 a student of divinity at Basle, was required in due course to compose a 

 discourse for public delivery on a given text of Scripture. All power to 

 grapple with the subject seemed gone from him ; and he was for days in 

 a state of nervous agitation, unable to deal with the matter in any way 

 satisfactory to himself. The evening before the day of ordeal, he com- 

 posed something, and lay down utterly disgusted with his performance. 

 He fell asleep, dreamed of a novel method of handling and illustrating 

 the subject ; awoke, leaped out of bed to commit the ideas to paper, 

 and, on opening his desk, found they were so committed already in his 

 own writing, the ink being hardly dry." 



A similar case is related of a student at Amsterdam, who was one of 

 ten to whom the professor, Van Swinden, gave the same problem in 

 arithmetic to work out. This student worked three successive nights on 

 the problem, and the third night, having covered three slates with 

 figures without success, his candle burnt out, and himself exhausted 

 with fatigue, he threw himself upon the bed and went to sleep. Next 

 morning, upon his writing table he found a paper in his own hand- 

 writing, containing the problem worked out in a manner much more 

 simple and direct than the method he had attempted while awake, and 

 the professor declared the solution was more simple and concise than 

 any which had occurred to him. No one had been in the room beside 

 himself, and he had done this work in unconscious sleep, and in the 

 dark, to boot. 



