[Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY]
On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place) Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! This far outstript the other; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind: For he, alas! is blind! O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, And knows not whether he be first or last.
[_P. W._, 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's _Note_, p. 638.]
Elucidation of my _all-zermalming_, [that is, all-crushing] argument on the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c.
Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense--not in words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality (most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided, perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [_imaginatio_] derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circumstance that the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture, the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused, and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence, because it is not true _terror_, that is, apprehension of danger, but is itself a specific sensation = _terror corporeus sive materialis_. The explanation and classification of these strange sensations, the organic material analogous (_ideas materiales intermedias_, as the Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences.