218 FSYCI/OLOGY. 



what the Societies for ' Psychical Research ' are collect" 

 ing aud trying to interpret in the most reasonable way. 



If the dream were the only one of the kind the subject 

 ever had in his life, if the context of the death in the dream 

 differed in many particulars from the real death's context, 

 and if the dream led to no action about the death, unques- 

 tionably we should all call it a strange coincidence, and 

 naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long 

 context, agreeing point for point with every feature that 

 attended the real death ; if the subject were constantly 

 having such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking 

 he had a habit of acting immediately as if they were true 

 and so getting ' the start ' of his more tardily informed 

 neighbors, — we should probably all have to admit that he 

 had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that his 

 dreams in an inscrutable way knew just those realities 

 which they figured, and that the word * coincidence ' failed 

 to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any 

 one preserved would completely vanish if it should appear 

 that from the midst of his dream he had the power of inter- 

 fering with the course of the reality, and making the events 

 in it turn this way or that, according as he dreamed they 

 should. Then at least it would be certain that he and the 

 psychologist were dealing with the sarae. It is by such 

 tests as these that we are convinced that the waking minds 

 of our fellows and our own minds know the same external 

 world. 



The psychologisf s attitude toivards cognition will be so 

 important in the sequel that we must not lea/e it until it is 

 made perfectly clear. It is a thoroughgoing dualism. It 

 supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and 

 treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself or 

 into the other, neither in any way is the other, neither 

 makes the other. They just stand face to face in a common 

 world, and one simply knows, or is known unto, its counter- 

 part. This singular relation is not to be expressed in any 

 lower terms, or translated into any more intelligible name. 

 Some sort of signal must be given by the thing to the mind's 

 brain, or the knowing will not occur — we find as a matter 



