Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LIV
NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 6.
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
APRIL, 1899.
_EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. The Stuff that Dreams are made of. By HAVELOCK ELLIS 721
II. The Best Methods of Taxation. By the Late Hon. DAVID A.
WELLS. Part I 736
III. Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare. By MARTIN W.
BARR, M. D. (Illustrated.) 746
IV. The Wheat Problem again. By EDWARD ATKINSON 759
V. The Coming of the Catbird. By SPENCER TROTTER 772
VI. Guessing, as Influenced by Number Preferences. By F. B.
DRESSLAR 781
VII. Concerning Weasels. By WILLIAM E. CRAM. (Illustrated.) 786
VIII. Care of the Throat and Ear. By W. SCHEPPEGRELL, M. D. 791
IX. The Physical Geography of the West Indies. I. The Mammals
of the Antilles. By Dr. F. L. OSWALD 802
X. Iron in the Living Body. By M. A. DASTRE 807
XI. The Malay Language. By Prof. R. CLYDE FORD 813
XII. Life on a South Sea Whaler. By FRANK T. BULLEN 818
XIII. Sketch of Manly Miles. (With Portrait.) 834
XIV. Editor's Table: Science and Culture.--Survival of the
Fittest 842
XV. Scientific Literature 845
XVI. Fragments of Science 854
XVII. Index to Vol. LIV 865
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[Illustration: MANLY MILES.]
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
APRIL, 1899.
THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF.
BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.
In our dreams we are taken back into an earlier world. It is a world
much more like that of the savage, the child, the criminal, the
madman, than is the world of our respectable civilized waking life.
That is, in large part, it must be confessed, the charm of dreams. It
is also the reason of their scientific value. Through our dreams we
may realize our relation to stages of evolution we have long left
behind, and by the self-vivisection of our sleeping life we may learn
to know something regarding the mind of primitive man and the source
of some of his beliefs, thus throwing light on the facts we obtain by
ethnographic research.
This aspect of dreams has not always been kept steadily in sight,
though it can no longer be said that the study of dreams is neglected.
From one point of view or another--not only by the religious sect
which, it appears, constitutes a "Dream Church" in Denmark, but by
such carefully inquisitive investigators as those who have been
trained under the inspiring influence of Prof. Stanley Hall--dreaming
is seriously studied. I need not, therefore, apologize for the fact
that I have during many years taken note from time to time and
recorded the details and circumstances of vivid dreams when I could
study their mechanism immediately on awakening, and that I have
occupied myself, not with the singularities and marvels of
dreaming--of which, indeed, I know little or nothing--but with their
simplest and most general laws and tendencies. A few of these laws and
tendencies I wish to set forth and illustrate. The interest of such a
task is twofold. It not only reveals to us an archaic world of vast
emotions and imperfect thoughts, but by helping us to attain a clear
knowledge of the ordinary dream processes, it enables us in advance to
deal with many of the extraordinary phenomena of dreaming, sometimes
presented to us by wonder-loving people as awesomely mysterious, if
not indeed supernatural. The careful analysis of mere ordinary dreams
frequently gives us the key to these abnormal dreams.
Perhaps the chief and most frequent tendency in the mechanism of
dreaming is that by which isolated impressions from waking life flow
together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is then produced,
in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, who in the
course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for
dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed
baby in a large codfish. The confusion may be more remote, embodying
abstract ideas and without reference to recent impressions. Thus I
dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a theory by which the
substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had been accompanied by,
and intimately associated with, the growing diminution of crime in
England. Amid my wife's rather contemptuous opposition, I opposed this
theory, pointing out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness,
greater comfort both in winter and summer, but at the same time it
occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a
sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need
scarcely say that this bizarre theory had never suggested itself to my
waking thoughts. There was, however, a real connecting link in the
confusion--the redness--and it is a noteworthy point, of great
significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that link, although
clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until the end of
the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel coincidence.
The best simile for the mechanism of the most usual type of dream
phenomena is the magic lantern. Our dreams are like dissolving views
in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but
always uninterruptedly, so that, at any moment, two (often indeed
more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness which
strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds and is
sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented to
dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which
psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words, and require
the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is
unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle
complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of
dreams.
It is the presence of the strife I have just referred to between
apparently irreconcilable groups of images, in the effort of
overcoming the critical skepticism of sleeping consciousness--a feeble
skepticism, it may be, but, as many people do not seem to recognize,
a real skepticism--that the impressive emotional effects of dreams are
often displayed. It sometimes happens that two irreconcilable groups
of impressions reach sleeping consciousness, one flowing from a recent
stratum of memories, the other from an older stratum. A typical form
of this phenomenon often occurs in our dreams of dead friends.
Professor Sully remarks that in dreams of the dead "awareness of the
fact of death wholly disappears, or reduces itself to a vague feeling
of something delightfully wonderful in the restored presence." That,
however, as I have elsewhere shown,[1] is not the typical process in
dreaming of the dead; although in the later dreams of those who often
see their dead friends during sleep, the process is abbreviated, and
the friend's presence is accepted without a struggle--a very
interesting point, for it tends to show that in dreams, as in the
hypnotic state, the recollection of previous similar states of
consciousness persists, and the illusion is strengthened by
repetition.
In typical dreams of a dead friend there is a struggle between that
stream of recent memories which represents him as dead and that older
stream which represents him as living. These two streams are
inevitably caused by the fact of death, which sets up a barrier
between them and renders one set of memories incongruous with the
other set. In dreams we are not able to arrange our memories
chronologically, but we are perpetually reasoning and striving to be
logical. Consequently the two conflicting streams of memories break
against each other in restless conflict, and sleeping consciousness
endeavors to propound some theory which will reconcile them. The most
frequent theories are, as I have found, either that the news of the
friend's death was altogether false, or that he had been buried alive
by mistake, or else that having really died his soul has returned to
earth for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such
dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound
impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are
too sacred to speak of. Even so cautious and skeptical a thinker as
Renan, when, after the death of his beloved sister Henriette, he
dreamed more than once that she had been buried alive, and that he
heard her voice calling to him from her grave, had to still his
horrible suspicions by the consideration that she had been tended by
experienced doctors. On less well-balanced minds, and more especially
in primitive stages of civilization, we can scarcely doubt that such
dreams, resting as they do on the foundation of consciousness, have
had a powerful influence in persuading man that death is but a
transient fact, and that the soul is independent of the body. I do not
wish to assert that they suffice to originate the belief.[2]
While dreams are thus often formed by the molding together of more or
less congruous images by a feeble but still intelligent sleeping
activity, another factor is to be found in the involuntary wavering
and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such
concentration as is possible during sleep always reveals a shifting,
oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it
were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names
of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters.
Any one who has ever been subject to the hypnagogic imagery sometimes
seen in the half-waking state, or who has ever taken mescal, knows
that it is absolutely impossible to fix an image. It is this factor in
dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. In addition
to the mere, as it were, mechanical flowing together of images and
ideas, and the more or less intelligent molding of them into a whole,
there is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the
final result--a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on
the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. I dreamed
once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his hand a
note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no
good, but he had lately taken some _selvdrolla_, recommended by a
friend, and it had done him more good than anything, so please send
him some more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of
reading it word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it;
the one word I actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name
of the drug, and that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I
gazed at it, the final impression being _selvdrolla_. The doctor took
from a shelf a bottle containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and
poured a little out, remarking that it had lately come into favor,
especially in uric-acid disorders, but was extremely expensive. I
expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, again to
my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on to a plate
of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to take and not
dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on awakening I had no
difficulty in detecting the source of its various minor details,
especially a note received on the previous evening and containing a
dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used my pocket lens
to determine. But what was _selvdrolla_, the most vivid element of the
dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had almost
renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil seen
on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling the
dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid. _Selvdrolla_
was evidently a corruption of "salad oil." I select this dream to
illustrate the uncertainty of dream consciousness, because it also
illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in dream
_subconsciousness_. Throughout my dream I remained, consciously, in
entire ignorance as to the real nature of _selvdrolla_, yet a latent
element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to me in
ever-clearer imagery.
While the confusions of dreaming are usually the union of unconnected
streams of imagery which have, as it were, come from widely remote
parts of the memory system to strike together at the narrow focus of
shaping consciousness, in some rarer cases the fused images are really
suggested by analogy and are not accidental. Maury records successions
of dream imagery strung together by verbal resemblances; I have found
such dreams rare, but other forms of association fairly common. Thus I
once dreamed that I was with a dentist who was about to extract a
tooth from a patient. Before applying the forceps he remarked to me
(at the same time setting fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of
something like a broomstick in order to dissipate the unpleasant odor)
that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found
that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an
inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I always
carry in waking life) I founds the diameter to be not less than
twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly hewn rock, and there
were sea-weeds and lichenlike growths within. The size of the tooth
seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that
pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs
to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules
unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in
a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream first quoted there was no
known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a walk during the
previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide,
and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to waking
consciousness, suggested itself during sleep.
The following dream illustrates an association of quite a different
order: I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house,
writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions
naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her night dress appear
at a lofty window some distance off and throw herself down. I went on
writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary
employment--I am not clear as to its precise nature--the very next
thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just
witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary
coincidence: it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Such dreams,
reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common,
with me at all events, though I can not easily explain them. The
association is not so much of analogy as of sensory media, in this
case the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a
scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. It is
interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping
consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.
It sometimes happens that the confused imagery of dreams includes
elements drawn from forgotten memories--that is to say, that sleeping
consciousness can draw on faint impressions of the past which waking
consciousness is unable to reach. This is a very important type of
dream because of its bearing on the explanation of certain dream
phenomena which we are sometimes asked to bow down before as
supernatural. I may illustrate what I mean by the following very
instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather
vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house, where the
furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs
threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one
Sir Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman who was accompanied by his son
and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him,
and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of
youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather
and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a
purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any definite
experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling incidents of the
previous day I realized that that was far from being the case. So far
from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination I found that
every minute item could be traced to some separate source. The name of
Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall
that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I
abandoned the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I
had scarcely done so when I chanced to take up a volume of
biographies which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I
found that it contained, among others, the lives of Lord
_Peter_borough and George _Bryan_ Brummel. I had certainly seen those
names the day before; yet before I took up the book once again it
would have been impossible for me to recall the exact name of Beau
Brummel, and I should have been inclined to say that I had never even
heard the name of Bryan. I repeat that I regard this as,
psychologically, a most instructive dream. It rarely happens (though I
could give one or two more examples from the experience of friends)
that we can so clearly and definitely demonstrate the presence of a
forgotten memory in a dream; in the case of old memories it is usually
impossible. It so happened that the forgotten memory which in this
case re-emerged to sleeping consciousness was a fact of no consequence
to myself or any one else. But if it had been the whereabouts of a
lost deed or a large sum of money, and I had been able to declare, as
in this case, that the impression received in my dream had never to my
knowledge existed in waking consciousness, and yet were to declare my
faith that the dream probably had a simple and natural explanation, on
every hand I should be sarcastically told that there is no credulity
to match the credulity of the skeptic.
The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and problems on
which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not those which
usually present themselves at once to dream consciousness. It is, so
far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the
incidental, the "forgotten" impressions of daily life which reappear
in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely
are those that sleep most profoundly. If we preserve the common image
of the "stream of consciousness," we might say that the grave facts of
life sink too deeply into the flood to reappear at once in the calm of
repose, while the mere light and buoyant trifles of life, flung
carelessly in during the day, at once rise to the surface, to dance
and mingle and evolve in ways that this familiar image of "the stream
of consciousness" will not further help us to picture.
So far I have been discussing only one of the great groups into which
dreams may be divided. Most investigators of dreams agree that there
are two such groups, the one having its basis in memories, the other
founded on actual physical sensations experienced at the moment of
dreaming and interpreted by sleeping consciousness. Various names have
been given to these two groups; Sully, for instance, terms them
central and peripheral. Perhaps the best names, however, are those
adopted by Miss Calkins, who calls the first group representative, the
second group presentative.
All writers on dreaming have brought forward presentative dreams, and
there can be no doubt that impressions received during sleep from any
of the external senses may serve as a basis for dreams. I need only
record one example to illustrate this main and most obvious group of
presentative dreams. I dreamed that I was listening to a performance
of Haydn's Creation, the chief orchestral part of the performance
seeming to consist chiefly of the very realistic representation of the
song of birds, though I could not identify the note of any particular
bird. Then followed solos by male singers, whom I saw, especially one
who attracted my attention by singing at the close in a scarcely
audible voice. On awakening the source of the dream was not
immediately obvious, but I soon realized that it was the song of a
canary in another room. I had never heard Haydn's Creation, except in
fragments, nor thought of it at any recent period; its reputation as
regards the realistic representation of natural sounds had evidently
caused it to be put forward by sleeping consciousness as a plausible
explanation of the sounds heard, and the visual centers had accepted
the theory.
It is a familiar fact that internal sensations also form a frequent
basis of dreams. All the internal organs, when disturbed or distended
or excited, may induce dreams, and especially that aggravated kind of
dreaming which we call nightmare. This fact is so well known that such
dreams are usually dismissed without further analysis. It is a
mistake, however, so to dismiss them, for it seems probable that it is
precisely here that we may find the most instructive field of dream
psychology. On account of the profoundly emotional effect of such
dreams they are very interesting to study, but this very element of
emotion renders them somewhat obscure objects of study. I do not
venture to offer with absolute certainty one or two novel suggestions
which dream experiences have led me to regard as probable.
Dreams of flying have so often been recorded--from the time of St.
Jerome, who mentions that he was subject to them--that they may fairly
be considered to constitute one of the commonest forms of dreaming.
All my life, it seems to me, I have at intervals had such dreams in
which I imagined myself rhythmically bounding into the air and
supported on the air. These dreams, in my case at all events, are not
generally remembered immediately on awakening (seeming to indicate
that they depend on a cause which does not usually come into action at
the end of sleep), but they leave behind them a vague but profound
sense of belief in their reality and reasonableness.[3] Several
writers have attempted to explain this familiar phenomenon. Gowers
considers that a spontaneous contraction of the stapedius muscle of
the ear during sleep causes a sensation of falling. Stanley Hall, who
has himself from childhood had dreams of flying, boldly argues that we
have here "some faint reminiscent atavistic echo from the primeval
sea"; and that such dreams are really survivals--psychic vestigial
remains--taking us back to the far past, in which man's ancestors
needed no feet to swim or float. Such a theory may accord with the
profound conviction of reality that accompanies such dreams, though
this may be more simply accounted for, even by mere repetition, as
with dreams of the dead; but it is rather a hazardous theory, and it
seems to me infinitely more probable that such dreams are a
misinterpretation of actual internal sensations.
My own explanation was immediately suggested by the following dream. I
dreamed that I was watching a girl acrobat, in appropriate costume,
who was rhythmically rising to a great height in the air and then
falling, without touching the floor, though each time she approached
quite close to it. At last she ceased, exhausted and perspiring, and
had to be led away. Her movements were not controlled by mechanism,
and apparently I did not regard mechanism as necessary. It was a vivid
dream, and I awoke with a distinct sensation of oppression in the
chest. In trying to account for this dream, which was not founded on
any memory, it occurred to me that probably I had here the key to a
great group of dreams. The rhythmic rising and falling of the acrobat
was simply the objectivation of the rhythmic rising and falling of my
own respiratory muscles under the influence of some slight and unknown
physical oppression, and this oppression was further translated into a
condition of perspiring exhaustion in the girl, just as it is recorded
that a man with heart disease dreamed habitually of sweating and
panting horses climbing up hill. We may recall also the curious
sensation as of the body being transformed into a vast bellows which
is often the last sensation felt before the unconsciousness produced
by nitrous oxide gas. When we are lying down there is a real rhythmic
rising and falling of the chest and abdomen, centering in the
diaphragm, a series of oscillations which at both extremes are only
limited by the air. Moreover, in this position we have to recognize
that the whole internal organism--the circulatory, nervous, and other
systems--are differently balanced from what they are in the upright
position, and that a disturbance of internal equilibrium
always accompanies falling. Further, it is possible that the
misinterpretation is confirmed to sleeping consciousness by sensations
from without, by the absence of the tactile pressure produced by
boots on the foot, or the contact of the ground with the soles; we are
at once conscious of movement and conscious that the soles of the feet
are in contact only with the air. Thus in normal sleep the conditions
may be said to be always favorable for producing dreams of flying or
of floating in the air, and any slight thoracic disturbance, even in
healthy persons, arising from lungs, heart, or stomach, and serving to
bring these conditions to sleeping consciousness, may determine such a
dream.
There is another common class of dreams which, it seems fairly evident
to me, must also find their psychological explanation chiefly in the
visceral sensations--I mean dreams of murder. Many psychologists have
referred with profound concern to the facility and prevalence of
murder in dreams, sometimes as a proof of the innate wickedness of
human nature made manifest in the unconstraint of sleep, sometimes as
evidence of an atavistic return to the modes of feeling of our
ancestors, the thin veneer of civilization being removed during sleep.
Maudsley and Mme. de Manacéïne, for example, find evidence in such
dreams of a return to primitive modes of feeling. It may well be that
there is some element of truth in this view, but even if so we still
have to account for the production of such dreams. For this we must,
in part at least, fall back upon the logical outcome of dream
confusions, owing to which, for instance, a lady who has carved a duck
at dinner may a few hours later wake up exhausted by the imaginary
effort of cutting off her husband's head. But I think we may find
evidence that the dream of murder is often a falsely logical deduction
from abnormal visceral and especially digestive sensations.
I may illustrate such dreams by the following example: A lady dreamed
that her husband called her aside and said: "Now, do not scream or
make a fuss; I am going to tell you something. I have to kill a man.
It is necessary, to put him out of his agony." He then took her into
his study and showed her a young man lying on the floor with a wound
in his breast, and covered with blood. "But how will you do it?" she
asked. "Never mind," he replied, "leave that to me." He took something
up and leaned over the man. She turned aside and heard a horrible
gurgling sound. Then all was over. "Now," he said, "we must get rid of
the body. I want you to send for So-and-so's cart, and tell him I wish
to drive it." The cart came. "You must help me to make the body into a
parcel," he said to his wife; "give me plenty of brown paper." They
made it into a parcel, and with terrible difficulty and effort the
wife assisted her husband to get the body down stairs and lift it into
the cart. At every stage, however, she presented to him the
difficulties of the situation. But he carelessly answered all
objections, said he would take the body up to the moor, among the
stones, remove the brown paper, and people would think the murdered
man had killed himself. He drove off and soon returned with the empty
cart. "What's this blood in my cart?" asked the man to whom it
belonged, looking inside. "Oh, that's only paint," replied the
husband. But the dreamer had all along been full of apprehension lest
the deed should be discovered, and the last thing she could recall,
before waking in terror, was looking out of the window at a large
crowd which surrounded the house with shouts of "Murder!" and threats.
This tragedy, with its almost Elizabethan air, was built up out of a
few commonplace impressions received during the previous day, none of
which impressions contained any suggestion of murder. The tragic
element appears to have been altogether due to the psychic influences
of indigestion arising from a supper of pheasant. To account for our
oppression during sleep, sleeping consciousness assumes moral causes
which alone appear to it of sufficient gravity to be the adequate
cause of the immense emotions we are experiencing. Even in our waking
and fully conscious states we are inclined to give the preference to
moral over physical causes, quite irrespective of the justice of our
preferences; in our sleeping states this tendency is exaggerated, and
the reign of purely moral causes is not disturbed by even a suggestion
of mere physical causation.
There is certainly no profounder emotional excitement during sleep
than that which arises from a disturbed or distended stomach, and is
reflected by the pneumogastric to the accelerated heart and the
impeded respiration.[4] We are thereby thrown into a state of
uninhibited emotional agitation, a state of agony and terror such as
we rarely or never attain during waking life. Sleeping consciousness,
blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from below,
and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at the idea
that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the guilty
consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense
emotional uproar. Thus the dream is suffused by a conviction which the
continued emotion serves to support. We do not--it seems most simple
and reasonable to conclude--experience terror because we think we have
committed a crime, but we think we have committed a crime because we
experience terror. And the fact that in such dreams we are far more
concerned with escape from the results of crime than with any agony of
remorse is not, as some have thought, due to our innate indifference
to crime, but simply to the fact that our emotional state suggests to
us active escape from danger rather than the more passive grief of
remorse. Thus our dreams bear witness to the fact that our
intelligence is often but a tool in the hands of our emotions.[5]
I have had frequent occasion to refer to the objectivation of
subjective sensations as a phenomenon of dreaming. It is, indeed, so
frequent and so important a phenomenon that it needs some further
reference. In hysteria (which by some of the most recent authorities,
like Sollier, is regarded as a species of somnambulism), in
"demon-possession," and many other abnormal phenomena it is well known
that there is, as it were, a doubling of personality; the _ego_ is
split up into two or more parts, each of which may act as a separate
personality. The literature of morbid psychology is full of
extraordinary and varied cases exhibiting this splitting up of
personality. But it is usually forgotten that in dreams the doubling
of personality is a normal and constant phenomenon in all healthy
people. In dreaming we can divide our body between ourselves and
another person. Thus a medical friend dreamed that in conversation
with a lady patient he found his hand resting on her knee and was
unable to remove it; awakening in horror from this unprofessional
situation he found his own hand firmly clasped between his knees; the
hand had remained his own, the knee had become another person's, the
hand being claimed, rather than the knee, on account of its greater
tactile sensibility. Again, we sometimes objectify our own physical
discomforts felt during sleep in the emotions of some other person, or
even in some external situations. And, possibly, every dream in which
there is any dramatic element is an instance of the same splitting up
of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion
from the rebuke or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who
administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves.
When we consider that this dream process, with its perpetual
dramatization of our own personality, has been going on as long as man
has been man--and probably much longer, for it is evident that animals
dream--it is impossible to overestimate its immense influence on human
belief. Men's primitive conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of
the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional
phenomena, have certainly been influenced by this constant dream
experience. It is the universal primitive explanation of abnormal
psychic and even physical phenomena that some other person or spirit
is working within the subject of the abnormal experience. Certainly
dreaming is not the sole source of such conceptions, but they could
scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not ever have
arisen, among races who were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A
large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a
large part of civilization itself, lies in realizing that the
apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons
and geniuses of all sorts that seemed at first to take possession of
the feeble and vacant individuality are themselves but modes of action
of marvelously rich and varied personalities. But in our dreams we are
brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and
shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of
our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.
There is one other general characteristic of dreams that is worth
noting, because its significance is not usually recognized. In dreams
we are always reasoning. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in
abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we may almost
be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That
our reasoning is bad, even preposterous, that it constantly ignores
the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the
question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful
confusion of ideas and images which at the outset I referred to as the
most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of
reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly
limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet,
grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, has very justly
determined that reasoning is the fundamental part of all thinking, the
very texture of thought. It is founded on perception itself, which
already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all
perception, as he shows, there is a succession of three images, of
which the first fuses with the second, which in its turn suggests the
third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction
of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely
what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself.
Reasoning is a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and
contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than
actual vision, since it produces hallucinations. To reasoning all
forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt has
said, is a thing that reasons. When we apply these general statements
to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is
really the same process of image-formation, based on resemblance and
contiguity, which is at the basis of reasoning. Every dream is the
outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The
supposed "imaginative faculty," regarded as so highly active during
sleep, is simply the inevitable play of this automatic logic. The
characteristic of the reasoning of dreams is that it is unusually bad,
and this badness is due chiefly to the absence of memory elements that
would be present to waking consciousness, and to the absence of
sensory elements to check the false reasoning which without them
appears to us conclusive. That is to say--to fall back on the
excellent generalization which Parish has elaborately applied to all
forms of hallucination--there is a process of dissociation by which
ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked and the
conditions prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It is, as
Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states
called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to
hallucination is most apt to occur.
The following dream illustrates the part played by dissociation: A
lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum of money
to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to Ireland.
On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather
was extremely wild and cold. She began, however, to make preparations
for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she
would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly jammed in a crab
basket. On returning home she fully discussed the matter with her
husband, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey,
and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream--the
elements of which could all be accounted for--the association between
sending money and postal orders which would at once occur to waking
consciousness was closed; consciousness was a prey to such suggestions
as reached it, but on the basis of these suggestions it reasoned and
concluded quite sagaciously. The phenomena of dreaming furnish a
delightful illustration of the fact that reasoning, in its rough form,
is only the crudest and most elementary form of intellectual
operation, and that the finer forms of thinking only become possible
when we hold in check this tendency to reason. "All the thinking in
the world," as Goethe puts it, "will not lead us to thought."
It is in such characteristics as these--at once primitive, childlike,
and insane--that we may find the charm of dreaming. In our sleeping
emotional life we are much more like ourselves than we are in our
sleeping intellectual life. It is a mistake to imagine that our moral
and æsthetic instincts are abolished in dreams; they are often
weakened, but by no means abolished. Such a result is natural when we
remember that our emotions and instincts are both more primitive and
less under the dominion of the external senses than are our ideas. Yet
in both respects we are removed a stage backward in our dreams.
The emotional intensity, the absurd logic, the tendency to
personification--nearly all the points I have referred to as
characterizing our dreams--are the characteristics of the child, the
savage, and the madman. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is
suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were, in the
arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature,
and in his dreams a man will listen to the arguments of his dog with
as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The
unexpected limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many
elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, imparts
a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the
sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our
emotions. "He has never known happiness," said Lamb, speaking out of
his own experience, "who has never been mad." And there are many who
taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake. In the waking
moments of our complex civilized life we are ever in a state of
suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the
multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness,
restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the
mathematician) and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our
pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober
tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilization are loosened, and
we know the fearful joy of freedom.
At the same time it is these characteristics which make dreams a fit
subject of serious study. It was not until the present century that
the psychological importance of the study of insanity was recognized.
So recent is the study of savage mind that the workers who have laid
its foundation are yet all living. The systematic investigation of
children only began yesterday. To-day our dreams begin to seem to us
an allied subject of study, inasmuch as they reveal within ourselves a
means of entering sympathetically into ideas and emotional attitudes
belonging to narrow or ill-adjusted states of consciousness which
otherwise we are now unable to experience. And they have this further
value, that they show us how many abnormal phenomena--possession,
double consciousness, unconscious memory, and so forth--which have
often led the ignorant and unwary to many strange conclusions, really
have a simple explanation in the healthy normal experience of all of
us during sleep. Here, also, it is true that we ourselves and our
beliefs are to some extent "such stuff as dreams are made of."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] On Dreaming of the Dead. Psychological Review, September, 1895. In
this paper I reported several cases showing the nature and evolution
of dreams concerning dead friends. I have since received evidence from
various friends and correspondents, scientific and unscientific, of
both sexes, confirming my belief in a frequency of this type of dream.
Professor Binet (L'Année Psychologique, 1896) has also furnished a
case in support of my view, and is seeking for further evidence.
[2] In Japan stories of the returning of the dead are very common.
Lafcadio Hearn gives one as told by a Japanese which closely resembles
the type of dream I am discussing. "A lover resolves to commit suicide
on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it
and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to
do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him 'Anata!' and felt her
hand upon his hand; and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him,
smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then
his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the
doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: 'Do not doubt; it is
really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my
parents thought me dead--buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead,
not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!'"
[3] Many saints (Saint Ida, of Louvain, for example) claimed the power
of rising into the air, and one asks one's self whether this faith may
not be based on dream experiences mistranslated by a disordered brain.
M. Raffaelli, the eminent French painter, who is subject to these
sleeping experiences of floating on the air, confesses that they are
so convincing that he has jumped out of bed on awaking and attempted
to repeat the experience. "I need not tell you," he adds, "that I have
never been able to succeed."
[4] Other pains and discomforts--toothache, for instance--may,
however, give rise to dreams of murder.
[5] It may be added that they also present evidence--to which
attention has not, I believe, been previously called--in support of
the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which
the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the
result of the emotion.
* * * * *
The harmonious and equitable evolution of man, says President
Dabney, of the University of Tennessee, "does not mean that every
man must be educated just like his fellow. The harmony is within
each individual. That community is most highly educated in which
each individual has attained the maximum of his possibilities in
the direction of his peculiar talents and opportunities."
THE BEST METHODS OF TAXATION.
BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS.
PART I.
This historical survey of tax experience among peoples widely
differing in their economic condition and social relations, and this
examination of the scope and practice of taxation, with especial
reference to the tax systems of the United States as defined and
interpreted by judicial authority, prepare the way for a discussion of
the best methods of taxation for a country situated as is the United
States. General as are the theoretical principles underlying taxation,
the application of these principles to existing conditions must be
modified to meet the long usage and inherited prejudice of the people,
and the form of production or manner of distributing wealth. This
holds true in the face of appearances so opposed to it as to defy
definition and acceptance. No less promising field for an income tax
can be pictured than British India, and few more promising fields than
France. Yet India has borne such a tax for years, while France will
not permit a true tax on income to be adopted as a part of its revenue
system. In the latter country the plea is made that the upper and
middle classes already pay under other forms of taxation more than
their due proportion of the public burdens, and an additional and
necessarily discriminating duty laid upon them will only make this
inequality the greater. Class interest may thus oppose its veto to a
change that promises to reduce the burdens of one class of taxpayers
at the expense of another; or may even oppose a change that offers the
chance of collecting a larger revenue with less real difficulty and
sacrifice on the part of the taxed. No opposition can set aside even
temporarily the great rules that clearly define a tax from tribute, a
legal and beneficial taking by the state of a certain part of the
public wealth from a demand that involves waste or mischievous
expenditure, for which the state or people derive no advantage
commensurate with the cost, or from which individuals obtain a gain
not defensible in justice, and at the expense of only one part of the
community.
After so many centuries of experiment, in which hardly a possible
source of state revenue has escaped attention, some knowledge of the
great principles of taxation might have been evolved. Unfortunately,
the experience of one nation is not accepted as containing lessons
applicable to the needs or conditions of another, and one generation
rarely appeals to history save to defend its own experiments.
Ignorance, half knowledge, which is quite as dangerous, and interest
guide or influence legislation, and those who predict failure or
danger are regarded as theorists, and denounced as unpractical.
Nowhere is the tendency to move independent of enlightened knowledge
more evident than in the United States. At every appearance of the tax
question, State and national legislatures are overwhelmed with
measures that have been tried in the past, and after a thorough test
condemned beyond any hope of defense.