Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

The phenomena of conversations, to which we appear to ourselves to be listening during sleep, or in which we appear to ourselves to be taking part, are, when analyzed, most remarkable occurrences, for it is the mind of the sleeper which originates the whole of what appears to be said by different persons. These conversations are as vivid, as much marked by different intellectual and personal characteristics, sudden and unexpected turns, apt repartee, interchange of ideas between two or more persons, as are the real conversations which we overhear, or in which we take part, when we are awake. Yet the whole of what is said, or appears to us to be said, is the invention of the one mind, which appears to itself to be listening to or talking with other minds, and all the while the body is wrapped in profound sleep. This extraordinary intellectual feat, so familiar to us that it scarcely attracts our attention unless we undertake to analyze it, is closely akin to the action of the mind when the body and the mind are neither of them asleep, and when we invent a conversation between different persons. But this occurrence is marked by another extraordinary peculiarity: for it happens, during sleep, to persons who could not, when awake, invent and write such conversations at will, and who in their waking hours have very little of the imaginative faculty needed for such productions. I account for this phenomenon by the hypothesis that when the mind is free from the necessity of depending on the bodily organs for its action, as it is during profound sleep of the body, when its normal relations with the body are completely suspended and it is left to its independent action, it has a power of separate action. This, I think, accounts for a kind of mental action which, when compared with that which occurs in conjunction with the action of the bodily organs, may be called abnormal. Under the impulse of its own unrestrained and uncorrected activity, the mind goes through processes of invention, the products of which are sometimes wild and incoherent, sometimes exceedingly coherent, sensible, and apt. Let the person to whom this occurs be thoroughly awakened out of one of these states, and the mind becomes immediately again subjected to the necessity of acting along with, and under the conditions of its normal relations to the body.

Akin to this mental feat of inventing conversations, during a sleep of the body, is the power of composing, during such sleep, oral discourse of one's own, or the power of composing something which we appear to ourselves to be writing. I suppose this is an occurrence which happens to most persons who are much accustomed to writing or to public speaking. It is often an involuntary action of the mind; that is to say, it is sometimes accompanied with a distinct consciousness that it is a process that ought to be arrested because it is a dangerous one, and yet it can not be arrested before full waking consciousness returns. On goes the flow of thought and language, apparently with great success; we seem to be speaking or writing with even more than our usual power, and all the while in the style that belongs to us; but, until we are fully restored to the normal relation of the mind and the body, we can not at will arrest this independent action of the mind, but must wait until our bodily senses are again in full activity. I do not suppose that this phenomenon ought to be explained by the hypothesis that there are certain parts or organs of the brain which are specially concerned in the work of original composition of intellectual matter, and that these organs are not affected by the sleep that is prevailing in other parts of the brain. While it is doubtless true that there are special systems of nerves which proceed from or conduct to special parts of the brain, and by which action is imparted to or received from the other organs of the body, and while some of these special parts of the brain may be in the state of absolute inactivity called sleep, and others are not, I know of no warrant for the hypothesis that the intellectual operations or processes are dependent upon any particular organ or organs of the brain, as distinguished from those from and to which proceed special systems of nerves. If any person, who is much accustomed to that kind of intellectual activity which consists in original composition of intellectual matter, will attend to his own consciousness, and probe it as far as he may, he will not find reason, I apprehend, to conclude that the power of thought and of clothing thought in language resides in any special part of the brain. His experience and introspection will be more likely to lead him to the conclusion that this power, whether it is exerted when he is asleep or awake bodily, is a power that inheres in the mind itself regarded as a spiritual existence and organism, and that the action of the brain, or of any part of it, is necessary to the exercise of this power only when it is necessary, as it is in our waking moments, to use some of the bodily organs in order to give the thought oral or written expression by giving it utterance through the vocal organs or by writing it down on paper. Certain it is that we conceive thoughts in more or less of connected sequence, and clothe them intellectually in language of which we have entire consciousness while the process is going on, without the action of any part of the body.

It may be objected to this view that the intellectual products which we seem to ourselves to be making when we are asleep would, if they could be repeated by an effort of the memory, word for word, just as they seem to have occurred, be found to be of the same incoherent, senseless stuff of which all dreams are made; and that this test would show that the brain is at such times not absolutely and completely in the condition which is called sleep, but that it is only partially in that condition; that it is performing its function feebly, imperfectly, and not as it performs that function when the whole body is awake. In reference to this hypothesis, I will repeat an anecdote which I have somewhere read, which is equally valuable whether it was an imaginary or a real occurrence.

A gentleman of literary pursuits, who was a very respectable poet, was subject to this habit of composition during sleep. One night he awoke his wife and informed her that he had composed in his dream some of the best and most original verses that he had ever written. He begged her at once to get a candle, pen, ink, and paper, and let him dictate to her the new composition that appeared to him so striking. When they read together the new poem on the next morning, it turned out to be nonsensically puerile. But occurrences of this kind, if they could be multiplied, would prove only that we are liable to illusions in sleep, in regard to the comparative merits of our intellectual products, which we imagine ourselves to be creating when we are in that state, as we are in regard to other things. We are under a delusion when we imagine in our dreams that we encounter and converse with another person, living or dead. We are perhaps deluding ourselves when in sleep we compose or seem to compose an original poem. But what is it that deludes itself, either in respect to the interview with another person, or in respect to the new composition? Is it the brain, or is it the mind? Is it a person, or a bodily organ that has the false impression, in the one case or the other? There must be a something that is subject to an illusion, before there can be an illusion. If both brain and mind are in profound sleep, absolute suspension of all action, there can be no illusion about anything. If the brain is absolutely asleep and the mind is not, the illusion is in the mind and not in the brain. That the latter is what often occurs, the experience of the illiterate and uncultivated makes them aware, as well as the experience of the lettered scholar and the practiced writer.[144]

Under the same head, I will now refer to those strange but familiar occurrences which take place when there come to us, in sleep, solutions of difficulties which we had not overcome by all our efforts while awake, and which appeared to us utterly dark when we lay down to rest. These mental phenomena are almost innumerably various. They take place in regard to all kinds of subjects, to lines of conduct and action, to everything about which our thoughts are employed; and they are a class of phenomena within everybody's experience. There is scarcely any one to whom it has not happened to lie down at night with a mind distressed and perplexed about some problem that requires a definite solution, and to rise in the morning, usually after a night of undisturbed rest, with his mind perfectly clear on the subject, and with just the solution that did not come to him when he devoted to it all his waking thoughts. What is the explanation of this phenomenon? If the mind is an independent entity, a spiritual organism, capable of its own action without the aid of the body under certain circumstances, this phenomenon can be explained. If the mind is not a spiritual organism, capable, under any circumstances, of acting without the aid of the bodily organs, this phenomenon can not be explained.

The most probable explanation is this: When we are awake, and devote our thoughts to a particular subject that is attended with great difficulties, we go over the same ground repeatedly—the mind travels and toils in the same ruts. Nothing new occurs, because we look at the subject in the same way every time we think of it. We are liable to be kept in the same beaten path by the associations between our thoughts and the bodily states in which we have those thoughts—associations which are exceedingly powerful. But let these associations be dissolved as they are during perfect sleep—let the mind be in a condition to act without being dependent on the brain or any other bodily organ for aid, or exposed to be hampered by the conditions of the body, and there will be a mental activity in which ideas will be wrought out that did not occur to us while we were awake. The memory, too, may recall a fact which we had learned while awake, and yet we may be unable to recollect how it came to our knowledge. At such times, the fact is recalled; but as the mind is acting in a condition which is abnormal when compared with the waking condition, and is liable to delusions about some things, we imagine that the fact is revealed to us in some wild and supernatural way, as by a person who is dead and who has come to us to communicate it. There is a well-authenticated account of an occurrence of this kind, given by Sir Walter Scott in one of the notes to his "Antiquary," and on which he founds an incident related by one of the personages in his story. The real occurrence was this: A gentleman in Scotland was involved in a litigation about a claim asserted upon his landed estate. He had a strong conviction that his father had bargained and paid for a release of the claim, but he could find no such paper. Without it he was sure to be defeated in the suit. Distressed by this prospect, but utterly unable to see any way out of his misfortune, he lay down to sleep, on the night before he was to go into Edinburgh to attend the trial of the cause. He dreamed that his father appeared to him, and told him that the claim had been released, and that the paper was in the hands of a lawyer in a neighboring town, whose name the paternal shade mentioned.

Before going into Edinburgh on the next day, the gentleman rode to the place which his father had indicated, and found the lawyer, of whose name he had been previously unconscious. This person turned out to be an old man, who had forgotten the fact that he had transacted this piece of business for the gentleman's father; but on being told of the fact that his client had paid his fee in a foreign coin of a peculiar character—which was one part of the story which the father's apparition related to the son—he recalled the whole of the circumstances, searched for the paper, and found it. The gentleman's estate was saved to him; but he became very superstitious about dreams, and suffered much from that cause, as was quite natural. Sir Walter's solution of the whole affair is of course the correct one: "The dream was only the recapitulation of information which Mr. R—— had really received from his father while in life, but which at first he merely recalled as a general impression that the claim was settled. It is not uncommon for persons to recover, during sleep, the thread of ideas which they have lost during their waking hours."[145] Sir Walter makes another observation which is worthy of being repeated—that in dreams men are not surprised by apparitions. Why are we not? Because the mind is in a state of abnormal activity, in which everything that occurs to it seems perfectly natural. The delusion in regard to the mode in which the very important fact was communicated to Mr. R—— in his dream, was substituted in the place of the actual communication made to him by his father during life. The latter he had wholly forgotten, and he had forgotten the circumstance of payment of the lawyer's fee in a peculiar coin, which had also been mentioned to him by his father when living. This remarkable incident, which might doubtless be paralleled by many similar occurrences, proves one of two things: either that the exercise of the memory is wholly dependent upon a waking condition of the brain, or that there may be an abnormal and imperfect act of memory while the brain is in profound sleep, in the course of which a fact becomes mixed with a delusion about the mode in which we are told of the fact. What happened to Mr. R—— was that his mind recalled the fact, but imagined that he then learned it for the first time from an apparition. I do not know how such a phenomenon can be explained, excepting by the hypothesis that the mind is a special existence, which acts during sleep of the body upon facts that are lodged in the memory, but mixes them with imaginary and delusive appearances, so that the mode in which the fact was actually learned is obliterated from the memory, and some supernatural mode of communication takes its place. On the return of waking consciousness, the mode in which the fact was actually learned is still shut out from recollection, and, if the person to whom this kind of delusion has occurred is of a superstitious turn, he will act on what he has imagined was told him by the apparition, because he has no other means of rescuing himself from an evil.

In regard to the mental phenomena which occur without delusions or apparitions, where the thoughts on a difficult subject become clearer and more satisfactory to us when we awake from sleep than they ever were during our waking hours, I suppose the explanation is this: During profound sleep of the body, including the brain, there is an entire suspension of every bodily function excepting the digestion of food and the circulation of the blood. If there is excited in some of the other organs an action of a peculiar kind, by an excitation of the nerves connected with those organs, it is proof that the condition of perfect sleep is not prevailing in all parts of the brain. The state to which I now refer supposes a complete inactivity of the whole bodily organism save in the digestive function and the circulation of the blood. In such a state, the mind, that which thinks and reasons, does not act upon the brain, and is not acted upon by it. It is capable of thinking on any subject which has employed its thoughts during the waking hours; and while, in some cases, it is visited by apparitions and subject to delusions, it is in other cases engaged in ideas that involve no delusive appearances. Freed from all the associations of these ideas with the feelings prevailing in the body when we think of the subject during our waking hours, we are able to perceive relations of the subject which have not before occurred to us. When we pass from the condition of sleep to the full consciousness of our bodily and mental organism, we are intellectually possessed of these new relations of the subject, which we have brought with us out of the state in which we acquired them, and they furnish us with new materials for the solution of the problem that we had not solved when we lay down to rest. It is not, I am persuaded, because the mind was at rest during sleep, and when we become awake is by reason of that rest better able to grapple with the difficulties of the subject, that we do grapple with them successfully; for in the case supposed, which is a very common experience, the thoughts are actually employed on the subject, while the body and the brain are in the absolute rest and inactivity of all the organic functions excepting those of digestion and circulation of the blood. I do not know that it is possible to detect, in a person sleeping, an increased circulation of the blood to any part of the brain which may be supposed to be concerned in the act of thinking, and at the same time to know that thinking is going on, unless such an observation could be made of a person in the state called somnambulism, which is not the state of which I am now speaking. But reasoning upon the phenomenon which I have now described, according to all that we can learn from our own experience or from observation of others, I reach the conclusion that the mind, the thinking and reasoning entity, can and does, in profound sleep of the body and the brain, employ itself upon a subject that has occupied us when awake, and can perceive new relations of that subject, which had not before occurred to us, without the activity of any portion of the nerve-center which is called the brain. Does this hypothesis assume that our thoughts when asleep are more valuable than our waking thoughts? It does, to a certain extent and under certain circumstances, for experience proves that in sleep we acquire ideas which we did not have before we fell asleep, and which we bring with us out of that condition.

That I have now given the true explanation of this familiar experience will appear, I think, from this consideration: There are very few nights when we do not in sleep have many thoughts. The states of perfect unconsciousness are comparatively rare. If the brain were never entirely asleep, if it were always engaged in the physical work of thinking—whatever that work may be—it would be worn out prematurely. But if the brain is perfectly at rest, while the mind is actively employed, the brain undergoes no strain and suffers no exhaustion; and the mind suffers no strain or exhaustion because it is in its nature incapable of wear and tear. It is only when the mind acts on the brain that exhaustion takes place. I speak now of what happens in states of ordinarily good health.[146]

I shall now refer to some of the very peculiar phenomena of somnambulism; and in illustration of their various phases I shall resort to Shakespeare's picture of the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, which, although purely imaginary, is a most accurate exhibition of nature. Treating it, as we are entitled to treat it, as if it were a real occurrence at which we ourselves were witnesses, with a knowledge of her character and history, an analysis of the situation in which she was placed when the habit of somnambulism came upon her, and of the mode in which her mind acted upon her body, will enable us to see the phenomena in their true philosophical aspect. We may suppose ourselves present, with the doctor and the gentlewoman of her bedchamber, when she comes forth in her night-dress and with a candle in her hand, and we witness the impressive scene of a disturbed mind overmastering the body while the body is asleep. It seems that, after the murder of Duncan, when she imbrued her own hands with his blood in smearing the faces of his sleeping grooms, the habit of sleep-walking had come over her. As we stand by the side of the awe-stricken witnesses, and hear their whispered conversation, we get the first description of her actions since the new king, Macbeth, her husband, whom she had instigated to murder the old king, went into the field. These first actions of hers, as described by the gentlewoman to the doctor, do not necessarily exhibit the working of a guilty conscience. They exhibit a mind oppressed and disturbed by cares of business and of state; and they are a distinct class of the phenomena of somnambulism. The gentlewoman tells the doctor that "since his Majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterward seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep." This is merely a description of what the witness has seen, and it might occur to any person of strong intellectual faculties, disturbed by great cares, without the action of a guilty conscience. It makes the situation real when the doctor recognizes the fact of this "great perturbation in nature! to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching." As they are whispering together, the doctor trying to make the gentlewoman tell him what at such times she has heard her say, which the loyal servant refuses to tell, Lady Macbeth moves forward, with the taper in her hand.