Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/701

No. 6.] . The common and habitual elements of dreams depend much on the combination of organic and dynamic elements which form the personality. Three things are to be considered: the organization, the age, and the sex. The rule of the last is absolute. Dreams and hallucinations have much in common, and have undoubtedly been often confounded. The narratives of St. John, Saint-Hilaire, and Swedenborg read like dreams. In certain forms of lunacy and delirium, the impression left is indelible, but apperception is wanting. These inexactitudes of memory render suspicious certain otherwise remarkable accounts, notably those of dreams induced by narcotics. Movements requiring complicated co-ordination, such as reading, writing, attentive and volitional sight, hearing, etc., are rarest in dreams, and as attention and apperception are correlative, we see the impossibility of any considerable logical sequence in dreams. To dream that one dreams seems equally impossible. Though an organic consciousness exists in dreams, consciousness, strictly so-called, slumbers. The dreams of Scipio and Lucian, or of Athalie, are without counterpart in nature. It is after waking that reason and conscience lend their imprint. It seems thus that the study of dreams can contribute nothing to the theory of the moral senses, or to aesthetics. They contain nothing but an image of a life made up entirely of sensations, such as might have been that of primitive humanity. The scenes have more surface than depth, and succeed each other rapidly and irrelevantly. The history of dreams, to conclude, has not yet been written, and cannot be, save by an exhaustive examination of the records of long observation, such as has not yet been attempted. Should this ever be accomplished, our knowledge of the senses, which are the source of the mental vitality, would be enriched by an entirely new chapter.

The distinction of Realism and Idealism in philosophy is a case of the wider distinction between common sense and reflective thought. The former is practical and immediate, the latter is theoretical and mediated by reason. Psychologically expressed, the former is tactual, the latter visual. The course of evolution shows that touch is the practical sense par excellence; hence, even in later stages of intellectual development, this sense is the touchstone of belief in reality. In science, the ultimate appeal is still to touch; science never rests satisfied until it can define things in terms of the tangible. All physical hypotheses about atoms, fluids, vibrations, etc., are just the outcome of the attempt to join expression to this fundamental and unnamable