from the study of one class of cerebral phenomena, a presumption of the separability of the conscious Self from the think ing brain; and thus, while admitting that "Thought may be a function of Matter," demonstrate that the Self in each of us is not identifiable with that which, for want of a better word, we call "Matter." The immeasurable difference between such a remembering lip-moving Teraph as we have supposed and a conscious Man indicates, as I conceive, the gulf leaped over by those who conclude that, if the brain can be proved to think, the case is closed against believers in the spirituality and immortality of our race. In brief, it is my aim to draw from such an easy and every-day psychological study as may be verified by every reader for himself, an argument for belief in the entire separability of the conscious self from its thinking organ, the physical brain. Whether we choose still to call the one "Spirit" and the other "Matter," or to confess that the definitions which our fathers gave to those terms have ceased to be valid in the light of Modern Science -that "Matter" means only "a form of Force," and that "Spirit" is merely "an unmeaning term for an unknown thing" -this verbal controversy will not in any way affect the drift of our argument. What we need to know is this: Can we face the real or supposed tendency of science to prove that "Thought is a function of Matter," and yet logically retain faith in personal Immortality? I maintain that we may accept that doctrine and draw from it an indirect presumption of immortality, afforded by the proof that the conscious self is not identifiable with that Matter which performs the function of Thought, and of whose dissolution alone we have cognizance. My first task must be to describe the psychological facts from which our conclusions are to be drawn, and which seem in themselves sufficiently curious and interesting to deserve more study on their own account than they have yet received. Secondly, I shall simply quote Dr. Carpenter's physiological explanation of these facts. Lastly, I shall, as shortly as possible, endeavor to deduce from them that which appears to me to be their logical inference. The phenomena with which we are concerned, have been often referred to by metaphysicians, — Leibnitz and Sir W. Hamilton amongst others,-under the names of "Latent Thought," and "Preconscious Activity of the Soul." Dr. Carpenter, who has discovered the physiological explanation of them, and reduced them to harmony with other phenomena of the nervous system, has given to them the title of "Unconscious Cerebration;" and to this name, as following in his steps, I shall in these pages adhere. It will probably serve our purpose best, in a popular paper like the present, to begin, not with any large generalizations of the subject, but with a few familiar and unmistakable instances of mental work performed unconsciously. For example; it is an every-day occurrence to most of us to forget a particular word, or a line of poetry, and to remember it some hours later, when we have ceased consciously to seek for it. We try, perhaps anxiously, at first to recover it, well aware that it lies somewhere hid den in our memory, but unable to seize it. As the saying is, we "ransack our brains for it," but failing to find it, we at last turn our attention to other matters. By and by when, so far as consciousness goes, our whole minds are absorbed in a different topic, we exclaim, "Eureka! The word, or verse, is-So and so." So familiar is this phenomenon that we are accustomed in similar straits to say, "Never mind; I shall think of the missing word by and by, when I am attending to something else;" and we deliberately turn away, not intending finally to abandon the pursuit, but precisely as if we were possessed of an obedient secretary or librarian, whom we could order to hunt up a missing document, or turn out a word in a dictionary while we amused ourselves with something else. The more this very common phenomenon is studied, the more I think the observer of his own mental processes will be obliged to concede, that, so far as his own conscious Self is concerned, the research is made absolutely without him. He has neither pain nor pleasure, nor sense of labor in the task, any more than if it were performed by somebody else; and his conscious Self is all the time suffering, enjoying, or laboring on totally different grounds. Another and more important phase of unconscious cerebration is that wherein we find our mental work of any kind, a calculation, an essay, a tale, a composition of music, painting, or sculpture, arrange itself in order during an interval either of sleep or wakefulness, during which we had not consciously thought of it at all. Probably no one has ever written on a subject a little complicated, or otherwise endeavored to think out a matter any way obscure, without perceiving next day that the thing has somehow taken a new form in his mind since he laid down his pen or his pencil after his first effort. It is as if a "Fairy Order" had come in the night and unravelled the tangled skeins of thought and laid them all neatly out on I have said that this work is done for us either asleep or awake, but it seems to be accomplished most perfectly in the former state, when our unconciousness of it is most complete. I am not now referring to the facts of somnambulism, of which I must speak by and by, but of the regular "setting to rights" which happens normally to the healthiest brains, and with as much regularity as, in a well-appointed household, the chairs and tables are put in their places before the family come down to breakfast. Again there is the ordinary but most mysterious faculty possessed by most persons, of setting over-night a mental alarum-clock, and awaking, at will, at any unaccustomed hour out of dreamless sleep. Were we up and about our usual business all night without seeing or hearing a timepiece, or looking out at the stars or the dawn, few of us could guess within two or three hours of the time. Or again, if we were asleep and dreaming with no intention of rising at a particular time, the lapse of hours would be unknown to us. The count of time in dreams is altogether different from that of our waking life, and we dream in a few seconds what seem to be the events of years. Nevertheless, under the conditions mentioned, of a sleep prefaced by a resolution to waken at a specified hour, we arrive at a knowledge of time unattainable to us either when awake or when sleeping without such prior resolution. Such are some of the more striking instances of unconscious cerebration. But the same power is obviously at work during at least half our lives in a way which attracts no attention only because it is so common. If we divide our ac tions into classes with reference to the Will, we discover that they are of three kinds-the Involuntary (such as the beating of the heart, digestion, &c.), the Voluntary, and the Volitional. The difference between the two latter classes of actions is, that Voluntary motions are made by permission of the Will and can be immediately stopped by its exertion, but do not require its conscious activity. Volitional motions, on the contrary, require the direct exertion of Will. Now of these three classes of action it would appear that all Voluntary acts, as we have defined them, are accomplished by Unconscious Cerebration. Let us analyze the act of Walking, for example. We intend to go here or there; and in such matters "he who wills the end wills the means." But we do not deliberately think, "Now I shall move my right foot, now I shall put my left on such a spot." Some unseen guardian of our muscles manages all such details, and we go on our way, serenely unconscious (unless we chance to have the gout, or an illfitting boot) that we have any legs at all to be directed in the way they should go. If we chance to be tolerably familiar with the road, we take each turning instinctively, thinking all the time of something else, and carefully avoid puddles or collisions with fellow-passengers, without bestowing a thought on the subject. Similarly, as soon as we have acquired other arts beside walking,-reading, sewing, writing, playing on an instrument, we soon learn to carry on the mechanical part of our tasks with no conscious exertion. We read aloud, taking in the appearance and proper sound of each word and the punctuation of each sentence, and all the time we are not thinking of these matters, but of the argument of the author; or picturing the scene he describes; or, possibly, following a wholly different train of thought. Similarly, in writing with "the pen of a ready writer," it would almost seem as if the pen itself took the business of forming the letters and dipping itself in the ink at proper intervals, so engrossed are we in the thoughts which we are trying to express. We unconsciously cerebrate,-while we are all the time consciously buried in our subject,—that it will not answer to begin two consecutive sentences in the same way; that we must introduce a query here or an ejaculation there, and close our paragraphs with a sonorous word and not with a preposition. All this we do not do of malice prepense, but because the well-tutored sprite whose business it is to look after our p's and q's settles it for us as a clerk does the formal part of a merchant's correspondence. Music-playing, however, is of all others the most extraordinary manifestation of the powers of unconscious cerebration. Here we seem not to have one slave, but a dozen. Two different lines of hieroglyphics have to be read at once, and the right hand is to be guided to attend to one of them, the left to another. All the ten fingers have their work assigned as quickly as they can move. The mind (or something which does duty as mind) interprets scores of A sharps and B flats and C naturals, into black ivory keys and white ones, crotchets and quavers and demisemi-quavers, rests, and all the other mysteries of music. The feet are not idle, but have something to do with the pedals; and, if the instrument be a double-actioned harp, a task of pushings and pullings more difficult than that of the hands. And all this time the performer, the conscious performer, is in a seventh heaven of artistic rapture at the results of all this tremendous business; or perchance lost in a flirtation with the individual who turns the leaves of the music-book, and is justly persuaded she is giving him the whole of her soul ! Hitherto we have noticed the brain engaged in its more servile tasks of hunting up lost words, waking us at the proper hour, and carrying on the mechanical part of all our acts. But our Familiar is a great deal more than a walking dictionary, a housemaid, a valet de place, or a barrelHe is a novelist who can organ man. spin more romances than Dumas, a dramatist who composes more plays than ever did Lope de Vega, a painter who excels equally well in figures, landscapes, cattle, sea-pieces, smiling bits of genre and the most terrific conceptions of horror and torture. Of course, like other artists, he can only reproduce, develop, combine what he has actually experienced, or read or heard of. But the enormous versatility and inexhaustible profusion with which he furnishes us with fresh pictures for our galleries, and new stories every night from his lending library, would be deemed the greatest of miracles, were it not the commonest of facts. A dull clod of a man, without an ounce of fancy in his conscious hours, lies down like a log at night, and lo! he has got before him the village green where he played as a boy, and the appletree blossoms in his father's orchard, and his long-dead and half-forgotten mother smiles at him, and he hears her call him "her own little lad," and then he has a vague sense that this is strange, and a whole marvellous story is revealed to him of how his mother has been only supposed to be dead, but has been living in a distant country, and he feels happy and comforted. And then he wakes and wonders how he came to have such a dream! Is he not right to wonder? What is it-who is it that wove the tapestry of such thoughts on the walls of his dark soul? Addison says, "There is not a more painful act of the mind than that of invention. Yet in dreams it works with that care and activity that we are not sensible when the faculty is employed" (Spectator, 487). Such are the nightly miracles of Unconscious Cerebration. The laws which govern dreams are still half unexplained, but the most obvious of them singularly illustrate the nature of the processes of the unconscious brainwork which causes them. Much of the labor of our minds, conscious and unconscious, consists in transmuting Sentiments into Ideas. It is not in this little essay that the subject can be developed in its various branches, the ordinary passions of life,-the religious and moral sentiments (wherein our translations are the source of all our myths and half our errors),*and lastly, insanity, wherein the false sentiment usually creates the intellectual delusion. Suffice it that our conscious brains are forever at work of the kind, "giving to airy nothing" (or at least to what is a merely subjective feeling) "a local habitation and a name." Our unconscious brains accordingly, after their wont, proceed on the same track during sleep. Our sentiments of love, hate, fear, anxiety, are each one of them the *E. g. Out of the Sentiment of the justice of God come Ideas of a great Final Assize and Day of Judgment. Out of the Sentiment that He is Author of all things, a definite Idea of six days' world-making," &c., &c. (From a Sermon by Rev. James Martineau.) fertile source of whole series of illustrative dreams. Our bodily sensations of heat, cold, hunger, and suffocation, supply another series often full of the quaintest suggestions,--such as those of the poor gentleman who slept over a cheesemonger's shop, and dreamt he was shut up in a cheese to be eaten by rats; and that of the lady whose hot bottle scorched her feet, and who imagined she was walking into Vesuvius. In all such dreams we find our brains with infinite play of fancy merely adding illustrations like those of M. Doré to the page of life which we have turned the day before, or to that which lies upon our beds as we sleep. Again, the small share occupied by the Moral Law in the dream world is a significant fact. So far as I have been able to learn, it is the rarest thing possible for any check of conscience to be felt in a dream, even by persons whose waking hours are profoundly imbued with moral feeling. We commit in dreams acts for which we should weep tears of blood were they real, and yet never feel the slightest remorse. On the most trifling provocation we cram an offending urchin into a lion's cage (if we happen to have recently visited the Zoological Gardens), or we set fire to a house merely to warm ourselves with the blaze, and all the time feel no pang of compunction. The familiar check of waking hours, "I must not do it, because it would be unjust or unkind," never once seems to arrest us in the satisfaction of any whim which may blow about our wayward fancies in sleep. Nay, I think that if ever we do feel a sentiment like Repentance in dreams, it is not the legitimate sequel to the crime we have previously imagined, but a wave of feeling rolled on from the real sentiment experienced in former hours of consciousness. Our dream-selves, like the Undines of German folk-lore, have no Souls, no Responsibility, and no Hereafter. Of course this observation does not touch the fact that a person who in his conscious life has committed a great crime may be haunted with its hideous shadow in his sleep, and that Lady Macbeth may in vain try and wash the stain from her "little hand." It is the imaginary acts of sleeping fancy which are devoid of moral character. But this immoral character of unconscious cerebration precisely tallies with the Kantian doctrine, that the moral will is the true Homo Nou menon, the Self of man. This conscious Self being dormant in dreams, it is obvious that the true phenomena of Conscience cannot be developed in them. Plutarch says that Zeno ordered his followers to regard dreams as a test of virtue, and to note it as a dangerous sign if they did not recoil, even in their sleep, from vice; and Sir Thomas Browne talks solemnly of "Sinful Dreams," which ecclesiastical history abundantly shows have proved terrible stumbling-blocks to the saints. But the doctrine of Unconscious Cerebration explains clearly enough how, in the absence of the controlling Will, the animal elements of our nature assert themselves generally in the ratio of their unnatural suppression at other times—and abstinence is made up for by hungry Fancy spreading a glutton's feast. The want of sense of sin in such dreams is, I think, the most natural and most healthful symptom about them. But if moral Repentance rarely or never follow the imaginary transgressions of dreams, another sense, the Saxon sense of Dissatisfaction in unfinished work, is not only often present, but sometimes exceedingly harassing. The late eminent physician, Professor John Thomson of Edinburgh, quitted his father's cottage in early manhood, leaving half-woven a web of cloth on which he had been engaged as a weaver's apprentice. Half a century afterwards, the then wealthy and celebrated gentleman still found his slumbers disturbed by the apparition of his old loom and the sense of the imperative duty of finishing the never-completed web. The tale is like a parable of what all this life's neglected duties may be to us, perchance in an absolved and glorified Hereafter, wherein, nevertheless, that web which we have left undone will have passed from our hands forever! Of course, as it is the proper task of the unconscious brain to direct voluntary labors started by the will, it is easily explicable why it should be tormented by the sense of their incompletion. But leaving the vast half-studied subject of dreams (a whole mine as it is of psychological discovery), we must turn to consider the surprising phenomena of Unconscious Cerebration, developed under conditions of abnormal excitement. Among these I class those mysterious Voices, issuing we know not whence, in which some strong fear, doubt, or hope finds utterance. The part played by these Voices in the history both of religion and of fanaticism it is needless to describe. So far as I can judge, they are of two kinds. One is a sort of lightning-burst suddenly giving intensely vivid expression to a whole set of feelings or ideas which have been lying latent in the brain, and which are in opposition to the feelings and ideas of our conscious selves at the moment. Thus the man ready to commit a crime hears a voice appealing to him to stop; while the man praying ardently for faith hears another voice say, "There is no God." Of course the first suggestion is credited to heaven, and the second to the powers of the Pit; but the source of both is, I apprehend, the same. The second class of Voices are the result, not of unconscious Reasoning, but of unconscious Memory. Under some special excitement, and perhaps inexplicably remote association of ideas, some words which once made a violent impression on us are remembered from the inner depths. Chance may make these either awfully solemn, or as ludicrous as that of a gentleman shipwrecked off South America, who, as he was sinking and almost drowning, distinctly heard his mother's voice say, "Tom! did you take Jane's cake?" The portentous inquiry had been addressed to him forty years previously, and (as might have been expected) had been wholly forgotten. In fever, in a similar way, ideas and words long consigned to oblivion are constantly reproduced; nay, what is most curious of all, long trains of phrases which the individual had indeed heard, but which could hardly have become a possession of the memory in its natural state, are then brought out in entire unconsciousness. My readers will recall the often-quoted and well-authenticated story of the peasant girl in the Hotel Dieu in Paris, who in her delirium frequently "spouted" Hebrew. After much inquiry it was found she had been cook to a learned priest who had been in the habit of reading aloud his Hebrew books in the room adjoining her kitchen. A similar anecdote is told of another servant-girl who in abnormal sleep imitated some beautiful violin-playing which she had heard many years previously. From Sounds to Sights the transition is obvious. An Apparition is to the optical sense what such a Voice as we have spoken of above is to the hearing. At a certain point of intensity the latent idea in the unconscious brain reveals itself and produces an impression on the sensory; sometimes affecting one sense, sometimes another, sometimes perhaps two senses at a time. Hibbert's ingenious explanation of the philosophy of apparitions is this. We are, he says, in our waking hours, fully aware that what we really see and hear are actual sights and sounds; and what we only conjure up by fancy are delusions. In our sleeping hours this sense is not only lost, but the opposite conviction fully possesses us; namely, that what we conjure up by fancy in our dreams is true, while the real sights and sounds around us are unperceived. These two states are exchanged for each other at least twice in every twenty-four hours of our lives, and generally much oftener, in fact every time we doze or take a nap. Very often such slumbers begin and end before we have become aware of them, or have lost consciousness of the room and its furniture surrounding us. If at such times a peculiarly vivid dream takes the form of an apparition of a dead friend, there is nothing to rectify the delusion that what we have fancied is real; nay, even a background of positive truth is apparently supplied by the bedstead, curtains, &c., &c., of whose presence we have not lost consciousness for more than the fraction of time needful for a dream. It would, I think, be easy to apply this reasoning with great advantage, taking into view the phenomena of Unconscious Cerebration. The intersection of the states wherein consciousness yields to unconciousness, and vice versa, is obviously always difficult of sharp appreciation, and leaves wide margin for self-deception; and a ghost is of all creations of fancy the one which bears most unmistakable internal evidence of being home-made. The poor unconscious brain goes on upon the track of the lost friend, on which the conscious soul, ere it fell asleep, had started it. with all its wealth of fancy it never succeeds in picturing a new ghost, a fresh idea of the departed, whom yet by every principle of reason we know is not (whatever else he or she may have become), a white-faced figure in coat and trousers, or in a silk dress and gold ornaments. But All |