MISS COBBE ON DREAMS.
IN the new (April) number of Macmillan's Magazine, Miss Cobbe has returned to the illustration of her views of
latent thought,' or as she prefers to call it, following in Dr. Carpenter's track, ' unconscious cerebration ;' and she illustrates them in this paper from the phenomena of Dreams. Miss Cobbe's general notion is the same as that of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in the interesting lecture on Mechanism in Thought and Morals' republished in England the other day by Messrs. Low and Sons,— namely, that all such mental experience as is entirely involuntary and unaffected by the activity of the will, is in some sense or other to be called mechanical,—and that the true self resides not in this involuntary organization of our ideas and feelings, but in the free and voluntary part of us which controls, modifies, and directs our waking thoughts. " I call that part of mental and bodily life mechanical," says Dr. Holmes, " which is independent of our volition ;" and he explains that he means by this the beating of the heart as regards the body, which we can in no wise directly control, and the flow of all those currents of thought in the mind over which we have no power to exercise a modifying influence. The will, as he correctly remarks, has considerable power to select the object of thought, but no power to banish thought altogether ; it cannot refuse to permit any thought, though it may substitute one thought for another. So far, then, he considers the circulation of some sort of thought in the mind as at least as mechanical as the circulation of the blood in the body; and any states of mind in which we have no power to select amongst our thoughts, but are, as it were, the victims of our thoughts, he would call cases of mechanism in thought.' On this point Miss Cobbe seems to have arrived at the same conclu- sion as Dr. Holmes, and in her new paper she illustrates it by a brief survey of the nature of dreams; and she infers from her survey that in dreams we receive impressions "from the work which is going on in our brains," but " incur no fatigue " thereby, and are " exempted from all sense of moral responsibility as regards it." "The instrument on which we are wont to play has slipped from our loosened grasp, and its secondary and almost equally wondrous powers have become manifest. It is not only a finger-organ, but a self-acting one ; which, while we lie still and listen, goes over, more or less perfectly, and with many a quaint wrong note and variation, the airs which we performed on it yesterday or long ago." "Is this instrument," she asks, in conclusion, "ourselves? Are we quite inseparable from this machinery of thought ?" and she replies, that judging by these two tests, the absence from dream-processes of the sense of fatigue which accompanies all personal effort, and the almost constant absence from them also of that habitual moral judgment of the waking life which is of the inmost essence of the personal self, we may almost infer that "the dreaming brain-self is not the true self for whose moral worthiness we strive, and for whose existence after death alone we care."
In criticizing Miss Cobbe's first essay on this subject at the time of its appearance, we gave some reasons for disputing her assump- tion that all latent processes of thought are in any sense mechani- cal, i.e., separable from the personal self. We pointed out, for in stance, that without latent or unconscious perception there would be no conscious perception, since every bit of colour or extension I perceive, is made up of an infinite number of infinitely small bits of colour or extension, which, taken separately, my organs are quite incapable of perceiving. Supposing, for instance, that my eye can see nothing smaller than the ten-thousandth part of a square inch,— then every square inch which I perceive must be perceived through the cumulation of more than ten thousand approximations to percep- tion of each of which, taken separately, I could have no consciousness. If then, we argued, every voluntary and conscious act of perception certainly depends upon the accumulation of a vast number of such acts of which we have no consciousness, can it be any argument against the personal character of any other act of mind that we had no consciousness of performing it ? Because we should need what may be called a mental microscope to perceive the infinitesimal acts of perception which make up a conscious act of perception, that is no reason why these infinitesimal acts are not our own at least as much as the conscious act which grows out of them. And, therefore, it is very dangerous to infer that any act stands in mere mechanical relations to the personality of him who performs it,— in the relation of a mere instrument to the power which uses it,
—simply because the agent has no consciousness of having produced it out of his own personality. Miss Cobbe may possibly admit the force of this warning, for in her essay on dreams she insists, on a somewhat different class of considerations, and argues for the separability of the brain-organization, which she apparently holds to be the thinking instrument, from the real self, chiefly on the pleas that dream-thoughts don't fatigue us as all intellectual work does, and that dream-thoughts are not morally even like our own, but very often as different from our own waking thoughts on the same subjects as if they belonged to a different personality. Thus, the most sensitively conscientious persons often commit in their dreams the most atrocious sins or crimes with perfect indifference or even satisfaction, as when an upright man serving with great honour on the bench of Judges finds himself repeatedly forg- ing in his dreams without the least self-reproach ; or a tender- hearted civilian runs his best friend through the body in his dream, to his own great delight ; or an honourable and charitable woman palms off a bad sixpence on a poor person in her dreams with the highest sense of satisfaction. How can it be the true self that gives birth to conceptions of its own actions quite degrading to its own permanent ideal of duty, without the slightest sentiment of horror or surprise ?
Now we fhould say, by way of criticism on these arguments, pretty much what we said in criticizing the argument derived from the unconsciousness of our own intellectual processes, that they are quite insufficient to establish the very important conclusion which Miss Cobbe draws from them, unless they are sufficient to estab- lish very much larger conclusions indeed. Are we prepared to admit that all moral and intellectual processes in which our thoughts float on without fatigue, or in which our minds present us with a disfigured picture of themselves, are elicited from a mechanical apparatus, on which, indeed, we can play at will, but which has no indissoluble connection with our own personal life ? Now, it seems to us quite certain that in both these respects the curious phenomena of dreams, which Miss Cobbe so well describes, are merely specially pictorial forms of not uncommon waking experience, though no doubt with a certain enhancement of the most remarkable features of that experience. As to the absence of fatigue in our dreams,—though the experience of the present writer by no means confirms this effortlessness of dreams as an anything like uniform characteristic of them, dreaming being not unfrequently with him a most fatiguing and uphill process,— we hardly see how, if admitted to the fullest extent, it even favours the cerebration' theory. Why should that which I do with effort be more of the essence of me than that which I cannot help doing whether I will or no? Might it not even be argued that what it takes me a great effort to do is less of the essence of me than what I do whether I will or no, —alike in time of relaxed or of intense effort ? The notion is apparently
that the stream of effortless thought in reverie or dream, is as absolutely dependent on the nerves agitated, as is the motion of the finger of the telegraph on the wires set in vibration, and that, therefore, the thoughts which I have without effort are not so much mine as those of the power or powers which conjured them up within me. Granted, if it were not true that the nerve-wires have been more or less made capable of their present telegraphy by our own voluntary life in time past. For instance, Miss Cobbe tells us of Dr. Reid's dream, dreamt at a time when he had a blister on his head, that he had fallen into the hands of a party of Indians and been scalped,—a dream which he would certainly not have dreamt if he had not learnt enough of the history of Indian tribes to dis- criminate the sensation of a burning pain in the head as one more or less resembling what the Indian practice must have inflicted. So when Miss Cobbe herself twice dreamt that she found herself in a great crowd gathered in the dark in some open place looking up to heaven, and became sensible as she saw the flaming sword in Orion, that the sky was clear, and that the darkness arose from the sun's having failed to rise, though it was high noon, the horror she felt was poured into her through astronomical conceptions acquired by her in times past ;—that is, the telegraphic effect was produced by wires more or less of her own making. The tune played upon you now would not have been played, had you not in your former life made the keys what they are. The effortlessness of dreams, then, even so far as it is to be admitted, does not make the order of thought in dreams a matter determined solely or chiefly by ex- ternal causes ; for every chord struck vibrates more or less as the dreamer by his past activity has taught it to vibrate. Where the terror of Miss Cobbe's dream came in the shape of a sky without the sun, or Jean Paul's in that of a Heaven without a God, Voltaire's might have arisen from a vision of a society without the capacity to praise, and Dr. Cumming's from the conception of an Apocalypse without the name and number of the Beast. That our dreams are dreamt without any modifying effort of our own, can be no evidence that they are external to us, unless the fact that, even in waking hours, we think -without effort of poetry directly anyone mentions Shake- speare, or think of snow summits, directly anyone mentions the Alps, is evidence that these thoughts are external to us. A great part of the order of waking thought is quite as effortless and in- evitable as any dream. If the effortlessness of the dream proves its mechanical and external character, then the effortlessness of these waking thoughts must prove the same. All life is a web, of -which laws over which we have no control are the warp, and free effort is the woof. In dreams there is more of the former than in the ordinary course of waking life, and less of the latter. But there are plenty of hours of wakefulness in which there is as much of the former and as little of the latter as in any dreams, and unless you can disown all these as external to your true self, you cer- tainly cannot, on this ground at least, disown your dreams.
Miss Cobbe's second argument,—the immense difference between the moral will of men awake and in dream,—(we entirely deny that it is anything like universal, the present writer though sometimes lawless in his dreams, is oftener simply his waking self in dreams) —would have a great deal more force in it, if it were not easy to bring instances of throwing oneself into very unnatural moral positions in hours of complete wakefulness, and to show to some extent in what respects dreams differ from reverie of this kind. A dream differs from an ordinary train of thought chiefly in this, —that it is almost always a highly pictorial representation, and also one of a single or linear succession of thoughts, the various branching or radiating threads of which are not kept together in a single mental sheath, as they would be during practical waking life. Now, in both these respects, the pictorial character of dreams and the single groove of associations along which the ideas run, there are plenty of waking states exactly like dreams. What schoolboy, or for that matter what man, has not put himself into the mental attitude of ordering his bosom friend off to instant execution, without ever thinking, for the purpose of that reverie, of the remorse he would feel for doing it ? What man studying the annals of crime has not considered how he would forge a bill or even commit a murder so as to succeed in escaping justice ? What woman has not contemplated the best mode of getting some use out of a bad piece of money which had been palmed off upon her? We are constantly putting ourselves through hypothetical situations in which, assuming for a moment a com- pletely different basis of action from our own, we yet achieve vic- toriously what another person has attempted and done bunglingly. Well, but Miss Cobbe will say,—the peculiar feature of a dream, the belief that you really hare acted so, does not belong to this state of mind ; and if you could once suppose that you really had acted thus in waking hours, you would be covered with remorse. Well, in the case of the present writer at least, that has constantly happened also in a dream ; many a time he has been wakened by the agony of remorse in his mind for a dreamt crime. But granting that this is often otherwise, we should explain it simply by this fact,—that a dream usually travels along a linear groove of associations, the peculiar direction of which we can never deter- mine beforehand, while for the delivery of a moral judgment, there must be enough of complexity of feeling present to the dreamer, for him to compare the motive from which he appeared himself to be acting with some higher motive which would have prevented him from so acting. The reason the schoolboy would feel remorse if he believed that he had really ordered his bosom friend off to the block, or the judge if he thought he had really committed forgery, would be that the other motives which should have deterred them, and which would certainly have been pre- ferred to the lower motives on which they acted, would imme- diately flash upon them and cover them with shame. But, in the dream, the track of associations probably branches off arbitrarily, before any such comparison occurs, in a new direction, and the chance of comparing the one thread of motive with another and higher thread of motive is lost. This is, we take it, the real explanation of the apparently often immoral character of dreams, —viz., that, owing to the passivity of the will, only one picture at a time is before the mind, and the relations of the particular picture to other possible pictures behind the immediate scene, which, with a will in full energy we should at once perceive, is ignored. But this is no reason at all for speaking of the dream as a mechanical process separable from the self. For if the one train of associations which a dream presents be separable from the self, so may all the others ; and if all are separable, then the waking life is as mechanical as the dream-life, for waking life consists
only in these various affections or motives for action, and the choice we make between them,—a choice in which we always and inevit- ably regard the affections which impel us, and the motives upon which we act, as as deeply-rooted in ourselves as we do those acts of will by which we control tend satisfy them. Is Miss Cobbe prepared to assert that the personal affections are part of the mere mechanism' of mind? If not, as they enter vitally into almost every involuntary train of thought, whether in dreams or other- wise, she can hardly be prepared to defend her hypothesis of unconscious cerebration.'
Previous page
