dy, just as
the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his hypnotizer; and that
persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster, Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs.
Piper and mediums generally--the genuine ones,--simply get their
impressions hypnotically from their sitters.

But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation. In the
first place, it does not cover the vividness and the emotional content
often displayed by the sensitive. The sitter is very seldom conscious of
anything approaching it. It comes nearer to, in fact almost seems
identical with, the frequent vividness and intensity of dreams. But where
do dreams come from, whether in sleep, or in a waking "dream state" like
that of Foster and many other sensitives? They don't come from any
assignable "sitter." This present scribe dreams architecture and
bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or than any ever made. Yet he is
no architect, or artist of any kind. Where does it all come from?

Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things. Where do
they come from? Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of truths not
previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes seem, to anybody
else. Where do they come from?

Du Prel and his school say they come from a "subliminal self," and Myers
picks up the term and spreads it through Anglo-Saxondom. But those queer
dreams frequently include persons who oppose the self--argue with it, and
even down it, sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and
increased stability. That does not seem like a house divided against
itself; such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall.
James, cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to
posit a "cosmic reservoir" of all thoughts and feelings that ever existed,
and of potentialities of all the thoughts and feelings that are ever going
to exist; and under various designations, this cosmic reservoir or,--it
seems a better metaphor--the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into
our little souls,--is a guess of virtually all the philosophers from James
back to Plato, and farther still--into the mists.

Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess: men's
speculations have been reaching back for the beginning of mind, until they
recognize that a consistent doctrine of evolution finds no beginning, and
demands mind as a constituent of the star-dust, and, when it really comes
down to the scratch, is unable to imagi