What share has your will had in all these modifications of sensation? The same that it has had in the coursing of your blood through your arteries and veins, in the action of your lymphatic vessels, or in the pulsation of your heart, or of your brain.
I have read the article on "Dreams" in the "Encyclopædia," and have understood nothing; and when I search after the cause of my ideas and actions, either in sleeping or waking, I am equally confounded.
I know well, that a reasoner who would prove to me when I wake, and when I am neither mad nor intoxicated, that I am then an active agent, would but slightly embarrass me; but I should be still more embarrassed if I undertook to prove to him that when he slept he was passive and a pure automaton.
Explain to me an animal who is a mere machine one-half of his life, and who changes his nature twice every twenty-four hours.
SECTION II.
Letter on Dreams to the Editor of the Literary Gazette, August, 1764.
Gentlemen: All the objects of science are within your jurisdiction; allow chimeras to be so also. "Nil sub sole novum"—"nothing new under the sun". Thus it is not of anything which passes in noonday that I am going to treat, but of that which takes place during the night. Be not alarmed; it is only with dreams that I concern myself.
I confess, gentlemen, that I am constantly of the opinion of the physician of M. Pourceaugnac; he inquires of his patient the nature of his dreams, and M. Pourceaugnac, who is not a philosopher, replies that they are of the nature of dreams. It is most certain however, with no offence to your Limousin, that uneasy and horrible dreams denote pain either of body or mind; a body overcharged with aliment, or a mind occupied with melancholy ideas when awake.
The laborer who has waked without chagrin, and fed without excess, sleeps sound and tranquil, and dreams disturb him not; so long as he is in this state, he seldom remembers having a dream—a truth which I have fully ascertained on my estate in Herefordshire. Every dream of a forcible nature is produced by some excess, either in the passions of the soul, or the nourishment of the body; it seems as if nature intended to punish us for them, by suggesting ideas, and making us think in spite of ourselves. It may be inferred from this, that those who think the least are the most happy; but it is not that conclusion which I seek to establish.
We must acknowledge, with Petronius, "Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit." I have known advocates who have pleaded in dreams; mathematicians who have sought to solve problems; and poets who have composed verses. I have made some myself, which are very passable. It is therefore incontestable, that consecutive ideas occur in sleep, as well as when we are awake, which ideas as certainly come in spite of us. We think while sleeping, as we move in our beds, without our will having anything to do either in the motive or the thought. Your Father Malebranche is right in asserting that we are not able to give ourselves ideas. For why are we to be masters of them, when waking, more than during sleep? If your Malebranche had stopped there, he would have been a great philosopher; he deceived himself only by going too far: of him we may say: