the outer covering of the body, with which it is really continuous, sympathises and becomes irritable and has its sensibility affected, on which account the meaning of impressions made upon it is more than usually perverted in dreams.

The internal organs which show their specific effects upon the mind most plainly are the reproductive organs; the dreams which they occasion are of such a character as leaves no doubt of the specific character of the stimulus. Without entering into a detailed discussion of their phenomena, I may deduce briefly from their striking character certain lessons which are not so plainly taught by the more obscure effects of other internal organs. In the first place, it is a probable inference from their characteristic effects that specific, though less striking, effects are produced by other organs. Secondly, it may be noted that these characteristic dreams, which appear for the first time when the reproductive organs begin to function, occur to the individual before there has been any actual experience of the exercise of these functions or any observation of their exercise. The experience is in entire accordance with the fact that there is no need ever to teach young persons how to exercise the functions; the instinct giveth the understanding necessary for its gratification. Clearly there are nervous substrata that are inactive in every person's brain until he reaches puberty and which then function for the first time. This might teach us to consider how many peculiarities of thought, feeling, and behaviour which differentiate us from other persons are due to nervous substrata inherited from near or remote ancestors, some of which come into functional action perhaps in connection with particular bodily changes that occur at certain periods of life. The individual who begins to feel, think, and act in accordance with his kind when the revolution of disposition takes place at puberty may also develop for the first time peculiarities of thought and feeling which his forefathers have shown, when, later in life, the functions of the reproductive organs wane or cease. Lastly, the mental operations of these organs serve to show of what character the effects produced by internal organs actually are, and for what factors in mind we are indebted to them. They engender a particular tone or feeling

of mind which is conducive to the origin and activity of certain related ideas, and they impart the force of desire by which conduct is inspired; but they do not, as some have supposed, directly affect the understanding, which is a function of the animal life or life of relation, and is developed out of sensations and motor reactions thereto,-that is, out of the capacity to receive impressions from without and to make responsive adaptations to them. The office of the intellect is to guide and direct, steersman-like, the force of individuality which is derived actually from the unconscious depths of the organic life; the sympathetic ideas which a particular mood of feeling stirs are the appropriate channels or forms in which that feeling gets expression when it is not translated instantly into action; and it will depend much upon the education of a person in youth, and by the experiences of life, whether the ideational activities shall be wise or unwise expressions of the fundamental feeling.

I have said enough to indicate how much the physiological action of the visceral organs has to do with the excitation and with the character of dreaming. On the whole it is probable that they are the most active agents in this respect; for the sleep of the body is not their sleep; they continue their functions through the night, albeit at a lower rate of activity; and if the sleep be light, or if one or more of their functions be so far deranged as to become an unusual stimulus, their cerebral sympathies will declare themselves in the irregular activities of dreams, when they are not so energetic as to cause waking.

4. Muscular Sensibility.-It is related of several holy persons of old, men and women, that in their spiritual raptures or ecstasies they rose bodily from the earth and floated in the air; and there can be small doubt that some of them felt and believed that they did. St. Philip Neri, St. Dunstan, St. Christina could hardly be held down by their friends, while it is told of Agnes of Bohemia that, when walking in the garden one day, she was suddenly raised from the ground and disappeared from sight of her companions, making no answer to their anxious inquiries but a sweet and amiable smile on her return to earth after her flight. Everybody must at one time or another have had a

similar experience in his dreams. The explanation is not far to seek a person may have a motor hallucination, so to speak, and imagine he makes the movement which he does not, just as he may have a sensory hallucination and imagine he sees or hears the thing which he does not. We are the victims of motor hallucinations when we suffer from what is called vertigo and the room seems to turn round; the intuitions of movements which we get from the disordered action of the motor centres, and which therefore are entirely subjective, are interpreted objectively in accordance with our ordinary sensory experience, just as sensations of subjective origin are interpreted objectively, and so become hallucinations. Certain drugs when taken into the blood produce vertigo at an early stage, and perhaps convulsions at a later stage of their operation; they affect the motor and associated sensory centres moderately in the first instance, exciting them to a disordered activity, the subjective aspect of which is vertigo, and afterwards more severely, when the disordered energy is discharged in actual convulsions. The drunken person when he shuts his eyes feels the bed to sink under him, the disorder of his motor intuition being interpreted objectively in that way, and when he falls on the ground or runs his head against the wall he perceives the ground to rise and strike him, or the wall to run forward against his head: his motor troubles and hallucinations are the direct consequences of the poisoning of his nervous centres by alcohol. One of the effects of aconite, when taken in poisonous doses, is to produce a feeling as if the body were enlarged or were in the air, mainly perhaps in this instance because of the loss of sensibility of the surface of the body which is an effect of the poison, whereby the person does not feel himself in contact with what is outside him; the part of the body from which he gets no message when it is touched appears therefore to be no longer his, and he interprets the interruption of feeling between him and the outside objects as an actual separation of substances such as would be produced by the body being in the air. These examples will serve to indicate how considerable a part motor hallucinations, combined as they commonly are with sensory disturbances, may play in the phenomena of dreaming.

An uncomfortable position in which the sleeper may chance to lie becomes the occasion sometimes of a dream that he is engaged in a desperate struggle, or is clambering for very life up a steep precipice, and when he has made the convulsive effort to save himself, which he feels that he cannot probably do on the instant, he awakes and relieves the constrained attitude. A not uncommon dream is that he is in imminent danger of falling from a height, and he awakes just as he makes the frantic effort to prevent himself from falling. It has been surmised that this dream is owing to the gradual relaxation of the muscles as he goes to sleep and to an ensuing sudden contraction of them, such as we observe to happen when a person's head who is very sleepy sinks gently forwards as the muscles relax, and then is pulled suddenly up with a jerk by their contraction; or it may be owing to the inclined position of the bed on which the body is lying. After great muscular exertion in climbing high mountains I have often dreamed of sliding down precipices, falling into chasms, and the like, and that so vividly sometimes as to be obliged, on waking, to stretch out my hands and grasp the sides of my bed before I could feel sure where I was; without doubt the wearied muscles were the occasion, through their motor centres, of the mental drama in which the sensory experiences of the day were worked up. But I was once surprised to dream this sort of dream when I had been making no particular muscular exertion in the day, nor had been near any mountains, and when I could at first think of nothing which could have provoked it; on reflection, however, I called to mind a momentary experience of the day which seemed to be a sufficient cause; for I had been driven rapidly in a waggonette to a railway station in the country, and as the horses turned a corner of the road as we went downhill, my muscles contracted involuntarily because I felt from the swing of the carriage a necessity to hold on to the seat. There could be no doubt that this momentary feeling of a support failing was the occasion of the night's dream. When Braid roused in the minds of persons whom he had put into the hypnotic sleep ideas associated with certain bodily attitudes by putting the body into the proper attitudes, he stimulated the mental states

through their suitable muscular acts; he might no doubt have excited them equally successfully without any muscular action by suitable stimulation, had it been possible, of the motor centres only; exciting in this way the motor intuitions without the actual movements, just as is done when delusive notions as to different positions of an amputated limb are excited by stimulation of its nerves. There can be little doubt that what Mr. Braid did experimentally in artificial sleep is a common occurrence in natural sleep, and ought to be taken account of in prosecuting inquiries into the causation of dreaming.

It may be interesting to speculate whether the movements of the heart and of respiration, which go on without intermission, and with only some abatement of energy, during sleep, have any effect upon dreams. That they have no such effect when they are not accelerated or retarded is proved by the fact, if it be a fact, that sleep is sometimes dreamless; but there is good reason to think that when they are disordered they testify of themselves in dreams. On several occasions I have had a dream in which I felt it urgently necessary to make an instant exertion in order to go on living, having experienced a vivid and urgent feeling that if I did not make it I should die; and although I have resolved after such a dream to remain quite still when next I had it, in order to test what would happen, I have never yet succeeded; so overwhelming is the apprehension at the time, that the necessary convulsive start or gasp has always been made, and I have awoke in a state of agitation with my heart beating tumultuously. The dream seems to have its origin in an impeded action of the heart, which, after enduring the oppression for a while, makes a violent beat to recover itself, and then goes on beating rapidly for a time. It may be presumed that a more rapid action of the lungs and of the heart than usual, or the ordinary action of these organs perhaps under some circumstances, will be felt by the brain during sleep, and so give a character to the ensuing dream. What this character is I am not able to say, unless there is truth in the conjecture that the sensation of flying in dreams is owing to a consciousness of the rhythmical activity of the lungs or of the respiratory movements, which suggests the rhythm of flying movements;