Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/245

230 of order.

I dreamt.

Who tells me this?

Who besides the

correctrice, by whose means I am in my wits, and without whom I am no longer myself?” This distinction between the mind directed by fancy, under the sway of the senses, and the appeal from thence to reason is directly asserted in the Winter's Tale. “Camillo.

Florizel.

Be advised.

I am, and by my fancy : if my reason

Will thereto be obedient, I have reason.

If not, my senses, better pleased with madness, Do bid it welcome.”

What is this corrector or controller of fancy? It is some

what begging the question to reply, that it is the reason; for reason is often held to include all the intellectual operations, and among them the one to be controlled. The real umpire appears to be the faculty of comparison, by which the un realities of imagination, or the misrepresentations of perverted sensation are contrasted with the knowledge derived from experience. Shakespeare somewhere remarks, that after one has looked fixedly at the sun, all things appear green. If this appearance continued, the mental preservative against belief in the reality would be, the comparison of present impressions with the memory of the past, the testimony of others, and a grounded belief in the unchangeability of nature. In the greater number of delusive appearances, one sense corrects another; but when all the senses and all the circum

stances of time and place continue to affirm the reality of some transaction, it is difficult to see from whence the cor

rective would come. If the sensations of dreaming were as clear and consistent as those of the waking state, how would men be able to distinguish the memory of their dreams from those of their real actions ?

There is a curious passage

bearing on this point in Troilus and Cressida. The young lover has just witnessed the falsehood of his mistress. He cannot at first believe the evidence of his senses, and argues

i