“No, sir,” answered Richard, surprised that a stranger should put the question.
“If you had been,” Wingfold went on, “I should have been surer of your seeing what I mean when I say, that to be out before sunrise is like looking at your best friend asleep—that is, before her sun, her thought, namely, is up. Watching her face then, you see it come to life, grow radiant with sunrise.”
“But,” rejoined Richard, “I have seen a person asleep whose face made it quite evident that thought was awake! It was shining through!”
“Shining through, certainly,” said Wingfold, “not up. I doubt indeed if during any sleep, thought is quite in abeyance.”
“Not when we are dead asleep, sir?—so dead that when we wake we don't remember anything?”
“If thought in such a case must be proved, it will have to go for non-existent. Yet, when you reflect that sometimes you discover that you must, a few minutes before, wide awake, have done something which you have no recollection of having done, and which, but for the fact remaining evident to your sight, you would not believe you had done, you must feel doubtful as to the loss of consciousness in sleep.”
“Yes; that must give us pause!”
“Hamlet!” said the clergyman to himself. “That's good! You may have read from top to bottom of a page, perhaps,” he went on, “without being able to recall a word: would you say no thought had passed through your mind in the process?—that the words had suggested nothing as you read them?”
“No, sir; I should be inclined to say that I forgot as fast as I read; that, as I read, I seemed to know the thing I read, but the process of forgetting kept pace for pace alongside the process of reading.”
“I quite agree with you.—Now I wonder whether you will agree with me in what I am going to suggest next!”