THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 126 



falling asleep. Trains effaces, landscapes, etc., pass before 

 the mental e^'e, first as fancies, then as pseudo-hallucina- 

 tions, finally as full-fiedged hallucinations forming dreams. 

 If we regard association-paths as paths of drainage, then the 

 shutting off of one after another of them as the encroaching 

 cerebral paralysis advances ought to act like the phigging 

 c^i the hole in the bottom of the pail, and make the activity 

 more intense in those systems of cells that retain any 

 activity at all. The level rises because the currents are 

 not drained away, until at last the full sensational explosion 

 may occur. 



The usual explanation of hypnagogic hallucinations is 

 that they are ideas deprived of their ordinary reductives. In 

 somnolescence, sensations being extinct, the mind, it is said, 

 then having no stronger things to compare its ideas with, 

 ascribes to these the fulness of reality. At ordinary times 

 the objects of our imagination are reduced to the status of 

 subjective facts by the ever-j)resent contrast of our sensa- 

 tions with them. Eliminate the sensations, however, this 

 view supposes, and the ' images ' are forthwith ' projected ' 

 into the outer world and appear as realities. Thus is the 

 illusion of dreams also explained. This, indeed, after a 

 fashion gives an account of the facts.* And yet it certainly 

 fails to explain the extraordinary vivacity and completeness 

 of so many of our dream-fantasms. The process of ' imagin- 

 ing ' must (in these cases at least f ) be not merely relatively, 

 but absolutely and in itself more intense than at other 

 times. The fact is, it is not a process of imagining, but a 

 genuine sensational process ; and the theory in question is 

 therefore false as far as that point is concerned. 



Dr. Hughlings Jackson's explanation of the epileptic 

 seizure is acknowledged to be masterly. It involves 



* This theory of incomplete rectiiication of the inner images by their 

 usual reductives is most brilliantly stated by M. Taine in his work on 

 Intelligence, book ii. chap. i. 



f Not, of course, in all cases, because the cells remaining active are them- 

 selves on the way to be overpowered by the general (unknown) condition to 

 which sleep is due. 



