Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 10

It is commonly said that love is a pa.s.sion to which man is always liable, and which may surprise him at any moment of his life from 15 to 75. This does not seem to me accurate; and a man is not throughout all his life and at every moment susceptible of falling in love (_de devenir amoureux_). When a man is in good physical and moral health, when he has easy and complete command of all his ideas, he may expose himself to circ.u.mstances the most capable of giving rise to a pa.s.sion, but he will not feel it. His desires will be reasonable and obedient to his will, leading the man only so far as he wishes to go, and disappearing when he wishes to be rid of them. On the other hand, if a man is morally below the mark (_malade au moral_),--if in consequence of physical fatigue or excessive intellectual work, or of violent shocks and prolonged sorrow, he is exhausted, melancholy, distracted, timid, incapable of controlling his ideas,--in a word, _depressed_,--then he will fall in love, or receive the germ of some kind of pa.s.sion, on the first and most trivial occasion.... The least thing is then enough; the sight of some face, a gesture, a word, which previously would have left us altogether indifferent, strikes us, and becomes the starting point of a long amorous malady. Or more than this, an object which had made no impression on us, at a moment when our mind was healthier and not capable of inoculation, may have left in us some insignificant memory which reappears in a moment of morbid receptivity. That is enough; the germ is sown in a favourable soil; it will develop itself and grow.

There is at first, as in every virulent malady, a period of incubation; the new idea pa.s.ses and repa.s.ses in the vague reveries of the enfeebled consciousness; then seems for a few days to have disappeared and to leave the mind to recover from its pa.s.sing trouble. But the idea has done its work below the surface; it has become strong enough to shake the body; and to provoke movements whose origin lies outside the primary consciousness. What is the surprise of a sensible man when he finds himself piteously returning beneath the windows of his charmer, whither his wandering feet have taken him without his knowledge;--or when in the midst of his daily work he hears his lips murmuring perpetually the well-known name!... Such is pa.s.sion in its reality; not as idealised by fantastic description, but reduced to its essential psychological characteristics. (_L'Automatisme Psychologique_, p.

466.)

On the other side I will appeal to Plato himself, giving a brief sketch merely of one of the leading pa.s.sages (_Symposium_, 192-212) where the Platonic conception of love is set forth.[38]

Plato begins by recognising, as fully as pessimist or cynic could do, the absolute inadequacy of what is called on earth the satisfaction of this profound desire. Lovers who love aright will feel that no physical nearness can content them, but what _will_ content them they cannot say.

"Their soul," says Plato, "is manifestly desiring something else; and what it is she cannot tell, only she darkly prophesies thereof and guesses it from afar. But if Hephaestus with his forging fire were to stand beside that pair and say: 'Is this what ye desire--to be wholly one? to be together by night and day?--for I am ready to melt you together and to make you grow in one, so that from two ye shall become one only, and in this life shall be undivided, and dying shall die together, and in the underworld shall be a single soul';--there is no lover who would not eagerly accept the offer, and acknowledge it as the expression of the unknown yearning and the fulfilment of the ancient need." And through the mouth of Diotima, Plato insists that it is an unfailing sign of true love that its desires are _for ever_; nay, that love may be even defined as the desire of the _everlasting_ possession of the good. And in all love's acts he finds the impress of man's craving for immortality,--for immortality whose only visible image for us on earth is the birth of children to us as we ourselves decay,--so that when the slow self-renewal of our own everchanging bodies has worn out and ceased, we may be renewed in brighter, younger bodies which we desire to be born to us from whomsoever we find most fair. "And then,"

says Plato, rising, as ever, from visible to invisible things, "if active _bodies_ have so strong a yearning that an endless series of lovely images of themselves may const.i.tute, as it were, an earthly immortality for them when they have worn away, how greatly must creative _souls_ desire that partnership and close communion with other souls as fair as they may bring to birth a brood of lofty thoughts, poems, statues, inst.i.tutions, laws,--the fitting progeny of the soul?

"And he who in his youth hath the need of these things in him, and grows to be a G.o.dlike man, wanders about in search of a n.o.ble and well-nurtured soul; and finding it, and in presence of that beauty which he forgets not night or day, brings forth the beautiful which he conceived long ago; and the twain together tend that which he hath brought forth, and are bound by a far closer bond than that of earthly children, since the children which are born to them are fairer and more immortal far. Who would not choose to have Homer's offspring rather than any sons or daughters of men? Who would not choose the offspring which Lycurgus left behind him, to be the very salvation of Lacedaemon and of Greece? or the children of Solon, whom we call Father of our Laws? or of other men like these, whether Greeks or barbarians, who by great deeds that they have done have become the begetters of every kind of virtue?--ay, and to these men's children have temples been set up, and never to any other progeny of man...."

"He, then, who to this end would strive aright, must begin in youth to seek fair forms, and should learn first to love one fair form only, and therein to engender n.o.ble thoughts. And then he will perceive that the beauty of one fair form is to the beauty of another near akin; and that if it be Beauty's self he seek, it were madness not to account the beauty of all forms as one same thing; and considering this, he will be the lover of all lovely shapes, and will abate his pa.s.sion for one shape alone, despising and deeming it but a little thing. And this will lead him on to see that the beauty of the soul is far more precious than any beauty of outward form, so that if he find a fair soul, though it be in a body which hath but little charm, he will be constant thereunto, and bring to birth such thoughts as teach and strengthen, till he lead that soul on to see the beauty of actions and of laws, and how all beauty is in truth akin, and the body's beauty is but a little matter; and from actions he will lead him on to sciences, that he may see how sciences are fair; and looking on the abundance of beauty may no longer be as the slave or bondman of one beauty or of one law; but setting sail into the ocean of beauty, and creating and beholding many fair and glorious thoughts and images in a philosophy without stint or stay, he may thus at last wax strong and grow, and may perceive that there is one science only, the science of infinite beauty.

"For he who hath thus far had intelligence of love, and hath beheld all fair things in order and aright,--he drawing near to the end of things lovable shall behold a BEING marvellously fair; for whose sake in truth it is that all the previous labours have been undergone: One who is from everlasting, and neither is born nor perisheth, nor can wax nor wane, nor hath change or turning or alteration of foul and fair; nor can that beauty be imagined after the fashion of face or hands or bodily parts and members, nor in any form of speech or knowledge, nor as dwelling in aught but in itself; neither in beast nor man nor earth nor heaven nor any other creature; but Beauty only and alone and separate and eternal, which, albeit all other fair things partake thereof and grow and perish, itself without change or increase or diminution endures for everlasting.

And whoso being led on and upward by human loves begins to see that Beauty, he is not far, I say, from reaching the end of all. And surely then, O Socrates (said that guest from Mantinea), man's life is worth the living, when he beholds that Primal Fair; which when thou seest it shall not seem to thee to be made after the fashion of gold or raiment or those forms of earth,--whom now beholding thou art stricken dumb, and fain, if it were possible, without thought of meat or drink, wouldst look and love for ever. What would it be, then, were it granted to any man to see Very Beauty clear;--incorruptible and undefiled, not mingled with colour or flesh of man, or with aught that can consume away, but single and divine? Could man's life, in that vision and beat.i.tude, be poor or low? or deemest thou not (said she), that then alone it will be possible for this man, discerning spiritual beauty with those eyes by which it is spiritually discerned, to beget no shadows of virtue, since that is no shadow to which he clings, but virtue in very truth, since he hath the very Truth in his embrace? and begetting and rearing Virtue as his child, he must needs become the friend of G.o.d; and if there be any man who is immortal, that man is he."

Between the aspects of love here expressed in extreme terms,--the planetary aspect, if I may so term it, and the cosmical,--the choice is momentous. I do not indeed say that in our estimate of love is involved our estimate of Religion; for Religion should mean the sane response of the spirit to all that is known of Cosmic Law. But Religion in the sense in which it is often used,--our emotional and ethical att.i.tude towards Life Unseen;--this is in reality too closely parallel to Platonic Love to allow the psychologist who denies reality in the one to a.s.sume reality in the other. For the Platonic lover the image of the Beloved one--no longer a matter of conscious summons and imagination--has become the indwelling and instinctive impulse to n.o.ble thought and deed. Even such to a Francis or to a Theresa is the image of the Divinity whom they adore; and if they claim that sometimes in moments of crisis they feel a sway, a guidance, a _communicatio idiomatum_ with the Divine, we may point in reply to the humbler, but more tangible, evidence which a.s.sures us that even between souls still inhabiting and souls who have quitted the flesh there may exist a telepathic intercommunication and an impalpable confluence from afar.

Brief as this survey has been, it has served to indicate that the psychical type to which we have applied the name of genius may be recognized in every region of thought and emotion, as in each direction a man's every-day self may be more or less permeable to subliminal impulses. Coming, then, to the question, "What is the origin of genius?"

I cannot accept the ordinary explanation that it is a mere "sport" or mental by-product, occurring as physical "sports" do in the course of evolution. The view which I hold,--the view which I am here suggesting, is in some sort a renewal of the old Platonic "reminiscence," in the light of that fuller knowledge which is common property to-day. I hold that in the protoplasm or primary basis of all organic life there must have been an inherent adaptability to the manifestation of all faculties which organic life has in fact manifested. I hold, of course, that "sports" or variations occur, which are at present unpredictable, and which reveal in occasional offspring faculties which their parents showed no signs of possessing. But I differ from those who hold that the faculty itself thus manifested is now for the first time initiated in that stock by some chance combination of hereditary elements. I hold that it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the "sport" has not called a new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing faculty above the threshold of supraliminal consciousness.

This view, if pushed back far enough, is no doubt inconsistent with the way in which evolution is generally conceived. For it denies that all human faculties must have been evoked by terrene experience. It a.s.sumes a subliminal self, with unknown faculties, originated in some unknown way, and not merely by contact with the needs which the terrene organism has had to meet. It thus seems at first sight to be introducing a new mystery, and to be introducing it in a gratuitous way.

To this I reply in the first place that so far as the origin of man's known powers is concerned, no fresh mystery is in fact introduced. All human powers, to put the thing broadly, have somehow or other to be got into protoplasm and then got out again. You have to explain first how they became implicit in the earliest and lowest living thing, and then how they have become thus far explicit in the latest and highest. All the faculties of that highest being, I repeat, existed _virtually_ in the lowest, and in so far as the admitted faculties are concerned, the difference between my view and the ordinary view may be said to be little more than a difference as to the sense which that word _virtually_ is here to a.s.sume.

The real difference between the two views appears when the faculties which I have called unknown come to be considered. If they are held to be real, my view is certainly the better able to embrace them. I hold that telepathy and telaesthesia do in fact exist--telepathy, a communication between incarnate mind and incarnate mind, and perhaps between incarnate minds and minds unembodied; telaesthesia, a knowledge of things terrene which overpa.s.ses the limits of ordinary perception, and which perhaps also achieves an insight into some other than terrene world. And these faculties, I say, cannot have been acquired by natural selection, for the preservation of the race, during the process of terrene evolution; they were (as we may phrase it) the products of extra-terrene evolution. And if they were so, man's other powers may well have been so also. The specialised forms of terrene perception were not real novelties in the universe, but imperfect adaptations of protoplasm to the manifestation of the indwelling general perceptive power. The mathematical faculty, for instance (we may, perhaps, say with Plato), pre-existed. When Dase solved all those sums in his head, his power of solving them was not a fresh development in his ancestral stock, but depended on the accidental adaptation of his organism to the manifestation of the indwelling computative power. I do not indeed venture to follow Plato in his ontogenetic argument--his claim that the individual computator has had already an individual training in computation. I do not say that Dase himself learnt or divined the multiplication-table in some ideal world. I only say that Dase and all the rest of us are the sp.a.w.n or output of some unseen world in which the multiplication-table is, so to speak, in the air. Dase trailed it after him, as the poet says of the clouds of glory, when he "descended into generation" in a humble position at Hamburg.

In him and in his ancestors were many faculties which were called out by the struggle for existence, and became supraliminal. But there were many faculties also which were not thus called out, and which consequently remained subliminal. To these faculties, as a rule, his supraliminal self could get no access. But by some chance of evolution--some sport--a vent-hole was opened at this one point between the different strata of his being, and a subliminal uprush carried his computative faculty into the open day.

Two things, of course, are a.s.sumed in this argument for which Science offers no guarantee. I a.s.sume in the man a soul which can draw strength and grace from a spiritual Universe, and conversely I a.s.sume in the Universe a Spirit accessible and responsive to the soul of man. These are familiar postulates. Every religion has claimed them in turn; although every religion in turn has so narrowed their application as grievously to narrow the evidence available for their support. But that which religions have claimed for their Founders or for their Saints--and what is sanct.i.ty but the genius of the ethical realm?--Psychology must claim for every form of spiritual indrawing, every form of spiritual response; for sleeping vision, for hypnotic rejuvenation, for sensory and motor automatisms, for trance, for ecstasy. The philosopher who has cried with Marcus Aurelius "Either Providence or atoms!"--who has declared that without this basis in the Unseen, "the moral Cosmos would be reduced to a Chaos";--should he not welcome even the humblest line of research which fain would gather from every unsolved problem some hint as to the spiritual law unknown which in time may give the solution of all?

We know not in what directions--directions how definitely predetermined--even physical organisms can vary from the common type. We know not what amount of energy any given plant or animal can absorb and incorporate from earth and air and sun. Still less can we predict or limit the possible variations of the soul, the fulness which it may receive from the World-Soul, its possible heritage of grace and truth.

But in genius we can watch at each stage the processes of this celestial nurture. We can imagine the outlook of joyous trustfulness; we can almost seem, with Wordsworth, to remember the child's soul entering into the Kingdom of Heaven. Childhood is genius without capacity; it makes for most of us our best memory of inspiration, and our truest outlook upon the real, which is the ideal, world.

From a greater distance we can watch the inward stir of mighty thought, the same for aeschylus, for Newton, for Virgil;--a stir independent of worldly agitation; like the swing and libration of the tide-wave across the ocean, which takes no note of billow or of storm.

Nay, we can see against the sun "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," and in Paul, as in Plotinus, we can catch that sense of self-fulfilment in self-absorption, of rapture, of deliverance, which the highest minds have bequeathed to us as the heritage of their highest hours.

These our spiritual ancestors are no eccentrics nor degenerates; they have made for us the sanest and most fruitful experiment yet made by man; they have endeavoured to exalt the human race in a way in which it can in truth be exalted; they have drawn on forces which exist, and on a Soul which answers; they have dwelt on those things "by dwelling on which it is," as Plato has it, "that even G.o.d is divine."

CHAPTER IV

SLEEP

d??a d' ?pa?te? a?sa ??s?p???? eta??ss??ta? te?e?t??.

?a? s?a ?? p??t?? ?peta? ?a??t? pe??s?e?e?, ???? d' ?t? ?e?peta? a????? e?d????' t? ??? ?st? ????

?? ?e??' e?de? d? p?a.s.s??t?? e????, ?t?? e?d??tess?? ?? p?????? ??e?????

de????s? te?p??? ?f??p??sa? ?a?ep?? te ???s??.

--PINDAR.

The preceding chapters have carried us two steps upon our way. In Chapter II. we gained some insight into the structure of human personality by a.n.a.lysing some of the accidents to which it is subject; in the third chapter we viewed this personality in its normal waking state, and considered how that norm should be defined, and in what manner certain fortunate persons had integrated the personality still further by utilising uprushes of subliminal faculty to supplement or to crystallise the products of supraliminal thought.

The review of these two chapters indicates clearly enough what my next step must be. It is obvious that in my review of phases or alternations of personality I have left out of sight the most constant, the most important alternation of all. I have thus far said nothing of _sleep_.

Yet _that_ change of personality, at least, has been borne in on every one's notice;--not, certainly, as a morbid curiosity, but as an essential part of life.

Let us then consider the specific characteristics of sleep. The definition of sleep is an acknowledged _crux_ in physiology. And I would point out that the increased experience of hypnotic sleep which recent years have afforded has made this difficulty even more striking than before. A physiological explanation must needs a.s.sume that some special bodily condition,--such, for instance, as the clogging of the brain by waste-products,--is at least the usual antecedent of sound sleep. But it is certain, on the other hand, that with a large percentage of persons profound and prolonged sleep can be induced, in _any_ bodily condition, by simple suggestion. Hypnosis, indeed (as Wetterstrand and others have shown) may be prolonged, with actual benefit to the sleeper, far beyond the point which the spontaneous sleep of a healthy subject ever reaches.

A good subject can be awakened and thrown into hypnosis again almost at pleasure, and independently of any state either of nutrition or of fatigue. Such sleep belongs to those phenomena which we may call nervous if we will, but which we can observe or influence from the psychological side alone.

We can hardly hope, from the ordinary data, to arrive at a definition of sleep more satisfactory than others have reached. We must defer that attempt until we have collected something more than the ordinary evidence as to what occurs or does not occur during the abeyance of waking life. One point, however, is plain at once. We cannot treat sleep,--as it has generally been treated,--in its purely _negative_ aspect. We cannot be content merely to dwell, with the common text-books, on the mere _absence_ of waking faculties;--on the diminution of external perception, the absence of controlling intelligence. We must treat sleep _positively_, so far as we can, as a definite phase of our personality, co-ordinate with the waking phase.

Each phase, as I believe, has been differentiated alike from a primitive indifference;--from a condition of lowly organisms which merited the name neither of sleep nor of waking. Nay, if there were to be a contest as to which state should be deemed primary and which secondary, sleep might put forward its claim to be regarded as the more primitive phase.

It is sleep rather than vigilance which prenatal and infantile life suggest; and even for us adults, however much we may a.s.sociate ourselves in thought with the waking state alone, that state has at least thus much of secondary and advent.i.tious that it is maintained for short periods only, which we cannot artificially lengthen, being plainly unable to sustain itself without frequent recourse to that fuller influx of vitality which slumber brings.

Out of slumber proceeds each fresh arousal and initiation of waking activities. What other activities may in slumber be aroused and initiated the evidence to be set forth in this chapter should help us to say. To some extent at least the abeyance of the supraliminal life must be the liberation of the subliminal. To some extent the obscuration of the noonday glare of man's waking consciousness must reveal the far-reaching faint corona of his unsuspected and impalpable powers.

Entering, then, upon a review of sleeping faculty, thus inevitably imperfect, we may best begin from the red end of our spectrum of consciousness;--the red end which represents the deepest power which waking effort can exert upon our physical organism.

Our survey of the efficacy of sleep, indeed, must make its beginning _beyond_ that limit. For a.s.suredly in sleep some agency is at work which far surpa.s.ses waking efficacy in this respect. It is a fully admitted, although an absolutely unexplained fact, that the regenerative quality of healthy sleep is something _sui generis_, which no completeness of waking quiescence can rival or approach. A few moments of sleep--a mere blur across the field of consciousness--will sometimes bring a renovation which hours of lying down in darkness and silence would not yield. A mere bowing of the head on the breast, if consciousness ceases for a second or two, may change a man's outlook on the world. At such moments,--and many persons, like myself, can fully vouch for their reality,--one feels that what has occurred in one's organism,--alteration of blood-pressure, or whatever it be,--has been in some sense discontinuous; that there has been a break in the inward _regime_, amounting to much more than a mere brief ignoring of stimuli from without. The break of consciousness is a.s.sociated in some way with a potent physiological change. That is to say, even in the case of a moment of ordinary sleep we already note the appearance of that special recuperative energy which is familiar in longer periods of sleep, and which, as we shall presently see, reaches a still higher level in hypnotic trance.

This recuperative power, then, lies just beyond the red end of our spectrum of waking faculty. In that obscure region we note only added power; an increased control over organic functions at the foundation of bodily life. But when we pa.s.s on within the limits of our spectrum of waking consciousness;--when we come to control over voluntary muscles, or to sensory capacity, we find that our comparison between sleeping and waking faculty is no longer a simple one. On the one hand, there is of course a general blank and abeyance of control over the realm of waking energies;--or in partial sleep a mere fantastic parody of those energies in incoherent dream. On the other hand, we find that sleep is capable of strange developments,--and that night can sometimes suddenly outdo the most complex achievements of day.

Take first the degree of control over the voluntary muscles. In ordinary sleep this is neither possessed nor desired; in nightmare its loss is exaggerated, in quasi-hysterical fashion, into an appalling fear; while in somnambulism,--a kind of new personality developed _ad hoc_,--the sleeper (as we shall see later on) walks on perilous ridges with steady feet. I have already said that morbid somnambulism bears to sound sleep a relation something like that which hysteria bears to normal life. But between the healthy somnambulist and the subject of nightmare we find from another point of view a contrast resembling that between the man of genius and the hysteric. The somnambulist, like the man of genius, brings into play resources which are beyond ordinary reach. On the other hand, just as in many hysterics certain ordinary powers of movement have lapsed below voluntary control, so also the dreamer who dimly wishes to move a constrained limb is often unable to send thither a sufficient current of motor energy to effect the desired change of position. That nightmare inability to move, which we thus feel in dream,--"when neither he that fleeth can flee, nor he that pursueth pursue,"--that sensation which both Homer and Virgil have selected as the type of paralysing bewilderment,[39]--this is just the _aboulia_ of the hysteric;--the condition when it takes a man half an hour to put on his hat, or when a woman sits all the morning looking at her knitting, but unable to add a st.i.tch.

"Somnambulism," however, is too vague and undefined a term for our present discussion. It will only be by a comparison with hypnotism, in the next chapter, that we can hope to get some clearer notion of "sleep-waking" states.

Let us pa.s.s on to consider _entencephalic sensory faculty_,--"mind's eye" faculty,--as shown in sleep or dream. Here too we shall find the same rule to prevail as with motor faculty. That is to say, on the whole the sensory faculty is of course dimmed and inhibited by sleep; but there are nevertheless indications of a power subsisting as vividly as ever, or with even added acuteness.

Baillarger in France and Griesinger in Germany (both about 1845) were among the first to call attention to the vivid images which rise before the internal vision of many persons, between sleep and waking. M. Alfred Maury, the well-known Greek scholar and antiquary, gave to these images a few years later the t.i.tle of _illusions hypnagogiques_, and published a remarkable series of observations upon himself. Mr. Galton has further treated of them in his _Inquiry into Human Faculty_; and cases will be found in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i, pp. 390, 473, etc.

These visions may be _hypnopompic_ as well as _hypnagogic_;--may appear, that is to say, at the moment when slumber is departing as well as at the moment when it is coming on;--and in either case they are closely related to dreams; the "hypnagogic illusions" or pictures being sometimes repeated in dream (as with Maury), and the hypnopompic pictures consisting generally in the persistence of some dream-image into the first moments of waking. In either case they testify to an intensified power of inward visualisation at a very significant moment;--a moment which is actually or virtually one of sleep, but which yet admits of definite comparison with adjacent moments of waking. We may call the condition one of cerebral or "mind's eye"

hyperaesthesia,--an exalted sensibility of special brain-centres in response to those unknown internal stimuli which are always giving rise to similar but fainter inward visions even in broadly waking hours.

For those who are already good visualisers such phenomena as these, though striking enough, present no quite unique experience. For bad visualisers, on the other hand, the vividness of these hypnagogic pictures may be absolutely a revelation.

The degree of acuteness, not of the visualising faculty alone, but of all the senses in dream, is a subject for direct observation, and even--for persons who can at all control their dreams--for direct experiment. Some correspondents report a considerable apparent accession of sensory power in dream. Others again speak of the increased vividness of dramatic conception, or of what has been called in a hypnotic subject "objectivation of types." "In each of these dreams," writes one lady, "I was a man;--in one of them a low brute, in the other a dipsomaniac. I never had the slightest conception of how such persons felt or thought until these experiences." Another correspondent speaks of dreaming two disconnected dreams,--one emotional and one geometrical,--simultaneously, and of consequent sense of confusion and fatigue.

The "Chapter on Dreams," in R. L. Stevenson's volume, _Across the Plains_ (already referred to in the last chapter), contains a description of the most successful dream-experiments thus far recorded.

By self-suggestion before sleep Stevenson could secure a visual and dramatic intensity of dream-representation which furnished him with the motives for some of his most striking romances. His account, written with admirable psychological insight, is indispensable to students of this subject. I am mentioning these well-known phenomena, as the reader will understand, with a somewhat novel purpose--to show, namely, that the internal sensory perceptions or imaginative faculty of sleep may exceed that of vigilance in something the same way as the recuperative agency of sleep surpa.s.ses the _vis medicatrix_ of waking hours.

I pa.s.s on to a less frequent phenomenon, which shows us at once intense imagination during sleep, and a lasting imprint left by these imaginations upon the waking organism;--an unintended self-suggestion which we may compare with Stevenson's voluntary self-suggestion mentioned just above.

The permanent result of a dream, I say, is sometimes such as to show that the dream has not been a mere superficial confusion of past waking experiences, but has had an unexplained potency of its own,--drawn, like the potency of hypnotic suggestion, from some depth in our being which the waking self cannot reach. Two main cla.s.ses of this kind are conspicuous enough to be easily recognised--those, namely, where the dream has led to a "conversion" or marked religious change, and those where it has been the starting-point of an "insistent idea" or of a fit of actual insanity.[40] The dreams which convert, reform, change character and creed, have of course a _prima facie_ claim to be considered as something other than ordinary dreams; and their discussion may be deferred till a later stage of our inquiry. Those, on the other hand, which suddenly generate an insistent idea of an irrational type are closely and obviously a.n.a.logous to post-hypnotic self-suggestions, which the self that inspired them cannot be induced to countermand. Such is the dream related by M. Taine,[41] where a gendarme, impressed by an execution at which he has a.s.sisted, dreams that he himself is to be guillotined, and is afterwards so influenced by the dream that he attempts suicide. Several cases of this kind have been collected by Dr.

Faure;[42] and Dr. Tissie, in his interesting little work, _Les Reves_, has added some curious instances from his own observation.