REVERY, AND TRANCE. 



246 



in a state of sleep, in which the external sense is closed, or of deep abstrac- 

 tion, in which it is inattentive ; and thus of presenting to the soul in its naked 

 state, as it may be called, pictures of objects no longer in existence. And 

 hence these philosophers, with great ingenuity, though, as it now appears, 

 with great incorrectness, undertook to solve many of the most difficult pro- 

 blems in nature ; accounted for the casual appearance of spectres in the 

 gloom of solitude and retirement, and directly unfolded to the world the 

 " stuff that dreams are made of." 



It is needless to point out the errors of this system, for it has long sunk 

 into disuse, never to rise again. And I shall therefore proceed to the rival 

 hypothesis of Aristotle, which, though equally unfounded in fact, has been 

 fortunate enough to descend to modern times, and to have met with very 

 powerful advocates in M. Wolff* and M. Formey.f It was the doctrine of 

 Aristotle, that external sensations not only produce by their stimulus a variety 

 of INTELLECTUAL FORMS or imagcs in the sensory, somewhat similar to the 

 ideas of Plato, and for all practical purposes not very dissimilar to what is 

 meant by ideas in the present day, but that these forms or ideas are themselves 

 capable of producing another set of forms or ideas, though of a more airy and 

 visionary kind : 



As every shadow has itself a shade. 



And to this secondary set, these slighter and more attenuate pictures of 

 things, he gave the name of phantasms. In the opinion of this philosopher, 

 dreams consist alone of these phantasms, or mere creatures of the imagina- 

 tion, first excited by some previous motion or sensation in the brain, and after- 

 ward continued in a more or less perfect series, according to the power of 

 the imagination itself. The only difference I am able to trace between this 

 theory, as started by Aristotle, and as restarted by Wolff, is in the greater 

 regularity that the latter assigns to the phenomena of dreaming, than the 

 former does: M. Wolff believing them to be, in their commencement, excited 

 by a sensation, and in their succession and series of representations to be as 

 much controlled by a peculiar system of laws, as the motions of the heavenly 

 bodies. Formey appears to carry this point a little farther : his language is, 

 if the dream be natural, it must necessarily originate agreeably to the law of 

 sensation, and be continued by the law of imagination ; and hence he con- 

 cludes those dreams to be supernatural, which either do not begin by sensa- 

 tion or are not continued by the law of imagination. 



It may be sufficient to remark upon this theory, first that the phantasms of 

 Aristotle have as' little claim to entity as the species of Epicurus; next, that 

 the assumption of a code of laws, or rather of two distinct codes of laws, 

 to regulate the fleeting train of our ideas in dreaming, is in itself altogether 

 visionary and gratuitous ; and that if the term chance or fortuitousness^ a very 

 useful term and full of meaning in all languages, can with propriety be ap- 

 plied to any thing, there is no subject to which it can be better applied than 

 to that of dreaming; in which the will, the only legislator and controller of 

 our ideas, has withdrawn its authority, and left the brain to a temporary law- 

 lessness and misrule ; and, lastly, that the distinction which is thus attempted 

 to be drawn between natural and supernatural dreams is not only altogether 

 fanciful, but could never be of any possible avail, even if well founded ; for, 

 in order to distinguish between the two, it would be necessary to be intimately 

 acquainted with those laws of sensation and imagination which are here 

 slated to regulate our natural dreams, and the suspension of which produce 

 dreams of a superior character. 



We are touching upon a delicate, and, perhaps, a dangerous inquiry; but 

 as it has been boldly handled in modern times, and made the foundation of a 

 more daring speculation upon the subject, it must not be flinched from in our 

 present discussion. That total absence of all natural law, which M. Formey 



* Psychol. Empir. sec. 123 tM^m. de I'Acad. de Berlin, ii. 



I 



