f in my mental progress. He usually travelled through Grafton
twice a month, and made it his convenience to put up over night with his
friends. It was there I used to meet him. His name was Daboll, and he
claimed to be descended from that ancient Connecticut maker of
arithmetics and almanacs, Nathan Daboll. He said that was why he became
a pedler--he was born to calculate. Yet his occupation sat very lightly
upon him. It gave him abundant opportunities for reflection and
conversation. In the latter he took delight, and lost no chance of
displaying his skill in setting forth his own ideas and drawing out
those of his customers. If he sold a pan or a broom it was accompanied
by some bit of philosophy that he had evolved on the lonesome stretches
of road between farmhouse and farmhouse. I write evolved; but that was
not his own word, nor his theory of the origin of his ideas. He claimed
that they came to him when he escaped his own control. I have forgotten
many of the details and examples which he used to give in explanation of
his doctrine, and should not remember them at all after so many years,
save that at various times I have had similar experiences, and that I
have been often reminded of them by the modern discussions of
psychology, and especially of the operations of the subjective mind. He
said that he was led into his view from thinking about his dreams which
were beyond control of the will. His next step was to observe that he
sometimes dreamed when awake; that is, thoughts came into his mind
without conscious effort, and at times when his head was wholly vacant
or wholly occupied with his business. Many things were made clear to him
in this manner, and he had come to the conclusion that the best way to
get the wisdom enjoined by the Bible and learned men, was to escape from
yourself, in short, to become passive. In long summer days, slowly
travelling his circuit of some forty miles, calling at every house where
he was well known, and must needs be in no haste to trade, (for country
people were never sure of what they wanted until they looked the cart
over), he had plenty of time to resign himself to the involuntary and
dreamlike states of mind, which solved for him the questions in which he
was most interested. I was not so much impressed that such notions
should come from a tin pedler as by the notions themselves; for at that
period the democracy of our New England towns considered and treated a
pedler as a man