A PHYSICIAN ON " DREAMY MENTAL STATES."

SIR JAMES CRICHTON BROWNE delivered last June a very interesting lecture on " Dreamy Mental States," before the Medico-Chirurgical Society, which he has published

extenso. We are quite willing to accept his authority,— indeed, more than his authority, his reasoning for the inferences with which he supports his authority,—for the assertion that the dreamy mental state of which the poets have made so much,—the sense of collapse and nothingness, for instance, with which the spirit sometimes discerns the unreality of the material universe, and asks of itself who and where and what it is and what is its real relation to the world around it,—is a morbid state, and is rather to be treated as a warning of bodily infirmity than as any adequate evidence of great mental gifts. But we decline to follow him when he seems to argue that because it is a warning of something that may turn out to be mischief in the brain, it should not be regarded as shedding light on the relation of the mind to the universe at large. Why should we not discern what is true through glimpses obtained in critical conditions of the brain as well as through glimpses obtained in healthy conditions of the brain ? We are told by the doctors, and no doubt truly told, that premature developments of calculating power or of a child's humour, or of shrewdness of any kind, are rather dangerous omens for the bodily health. Sir Walter Scott's little pet, Marjory Fleming, whose story as told by Dr. John Browne has filled so many hearts with delight and with love for a child they had never seen, died in infancy of water on the brain ; but her infantine glimpses of the world were on that account none the less remarkable for their vivacity and charm. Coleridge and his eldest son, Hartley, were prema- turely developed, and probably owed to that cause the want of self-restraining power which led to their fatal weakness; but not the less do we enjoy Coleridge's wonderful imaginative visions and Hartley Coleridge's exquisite sonnets. A great many people have argued, and have argued truly, that the high pressure at which great poetry is written has its com.

pensating mischief in that liability to physical and mental conditions in which the man of genius loses his way alto- gether, and instead of teaching others, needs to be protected and restrained by those who are altogether his inferiors in mental power. Sir James Crichton Browne shows his literary discrimination by citing a considerable number of poets who have delineated the dreamy side of human nature with a power and felicity which has added im-

mensely to the literature of our race, and even, we venture to say, to its grasp of truth, whether the state of mind thus fixed for ever in our imagination be on the borderland of nervous disease or not. He cites, for instance, Words- worth's great " Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," but only to give us that fine passage suggesting that this life overshadows the reminiscences of a brighter and purer existence with its tyrannical ties and passions, and obscures the gleams of the light which the spirit had enjoyed in some earlier union with God. That may be,—we believe it is,—a

misinterpretation of the freshness and glory of the spirit in 3hildhood, even though it brings into true relief the life of the imagination, and gives us a most impressive warning of the tendency of practical life to submerge ideal ends in a mass of dusty detail. But Sir J. Crichton Browne has not quoted passage which is still more closely germane to his subject,— namely, the dreamy states of the human mind,—in which Wordsworth described as no other poet has described,— " —Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings ;

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised!"

—in which Wordsworth found not the misleading suggestions pf a morbid fancy, but solemn warning of a divine origin, justifying his passionate rebellion against the prison-bars of a much too common sense. Cardinal Newman expressed the

same feeling that death itself is the great revelation of the nothingness of the soul without God, in his wonderful picture of " the fallings from us, vanishings " of the material world itself in the moment of the departure of the soul from the body :-

"Jesu, Maria, I am near to death, And thou art calling me, I know it now, Not by the token of this faltering breath, The chill at heart, the dampness on my brow (Jesu have mercy, Mary pray for me!), 'Tis this new feeling never felt before (Be with me, Lord, in my extremity !),

That I am going, that I am no more.

'Tis this strange innermost abandonment (Lover of Souls, Great God, I look to thee!), This emptying out of each constituent And natural force by which I came to be.

.. ..... • • 'Tis death, oh loving friends, your prayers, 'tis he, As though my very being had given way, As though I was no more a substance now, And could fall back on nought to be my stay (Help, loving Lord, thou my sole Refuge now !), And turn nowhither, and must needs decay, And drop from out the universal frame Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, That utter nothingness of which I came."

Surely when it is the great object of the poet to delineate the collapse of the soul when it undergoes the severance between it and the world of sense, it is no wonder that he should seize a moment of physical collapse, of what the doctors call morbid phenomena, for his purpose. It would be strange indeed if no light as to the relation of the soul to what is beyond the body, could be gained from the experience of moments in which the bodily powers are not at their best, and at which therefore the soul anticipates, and indeed may be said really to discern, their transience and almost their nothingness. You never see the limitations and weaknesses even of human inventions better than when they are giving way, and it seems to us a great mistake to regard the morbid character of human states as an evidence that the light they let in upon our nature is not true light. Of course, in fever we may be delirious, and imagine what is not. But there are plenty of morbid states in which there is no delirium, but in which we see the rifts in our composite nature as they really are. Of these the visionary poet avails himself in such splendid poems as Wordsworth's " Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" or Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." We are far from denying that when the mind is an ordinary mind which cannot grapple to any good effect with bodily ailments or the great mental problems they open to us, the best thing that any physician can do is to put an end as soon as possible to these glimpses of truth obtained as it were through the miscarriage of bodily functions. No doubt many of Sir J. Crichton Browne's cases prove that there are people who suffer from these "dreamy states," and who gain nothing bat misery and mischief from them. But it does not follow in the least that because ordinary mortals cannot use them for any higher purposes, great thinkers and poets cannot. And, as a matter of fact, we owe some of oar noblest insight into human nature to the liability of great poets or thinkers like Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Newman, to the onset of those attacks of trance which Sir J. Crichton Browne regards as finding their closest affinity in fits of epilepsy.

The truth is that not only great imaginative minds have, done the human race good service by showing us the ideal

basis of the universe, and the complete dependence of natural things on ultimate spiritual powers, but even the men of science have come to see that as much new truth is accessible through these rifts in the physical organisation of man, as can be gained by insisting on what are usually called the laws of physical nature themselves. As Mr. Balfour observed, in the impressive address which he delivered about a year ago to the Society for Psychical Research, we are only just beginning to study the rationale of the startling facts illustrating the widely spread phenomena of telepathic impressions,—the impressions communicated apparently by persons suffering in one place, or even one quarter of the globe, to persons who are in some ill-defined, but yet unques- tionably significant sympathy with them in another place, or another quarter of the globe,—without any physical com- munication between them ; and yet no phenomena could be more important in relation to our understanding of human nature, and of its true place in the universe. As Mr. Balfour showed us, we cannot explain these phenomena by any physical laws such as those of gravitation or of light ; indeed the closest physical analogy for them is perhaps the induction of a series of vibrations in an electric cable by mere sympathy with corresponding vibrations taking place in an electric cable at some distance from it ; and yet these nervous phenomena are often much more marked in people of hyper- sensitive organisation, whom the physicians would term persons of morbid temperament, than in persons of strong and stable physique. Not only the men of imagination, but the men of science, obtain much useful information, through the "cracks," as the physieians think them, in the human brain. And we strongly suspect that the next great step in the right under- standing of the universe, will be made by the help of what physicians deem the study of morbid phenomena. Not all the light of the universe comes through healthy temperaments. A good deal of it comes through the chinks or deficiencies in ill-balanced or even unbalanced minds.