ther fantastic and
unreal, is unscientific. In the mingling of the real and the apparently
unreal, in the dream state, while the experience itself is always real to
the dreamer, lies undoubtedly the source of many beliefs that influence
the lives of men.

Dreaming must be regarded as one of the states of consciousness, and
hence, of whatsoever stuff dreams are made, they represent an actual
experience of the individual. No greater mistake can be made than the
belief that no experience is real save that which brings us in contact
with gross matter through the agency of the five senses. The world of
ideas and the creations of the imagination are in fact no more evanescent
than matter itself. Here impermanency differs only in time. All in time
pass away.

I hold that dreams, in general, show more clearly the nature of the soul,
and the experiences of the waking state show the office of the bodily
organism, and that each _on its own plane_ is as valid as the other.

In other words, "the soul is such stuff as dreams are made of." It does
not hold true, nor need it, that the experiences in dreams shall be true
and valid on the physical plane, though this is often the case, or that
the experiences of the physical plane shall be literally repeated in
dreams, which, nevertheless, frequently happens.

It is an undeniable fact that the experiences of the conscious ego in man
compass the subjective no less than the objective planes of being. That
the subjective avenues should be closed when the ego is functioning on the
physical plane through the bodily organs by aid of the senses, is quite as
remarkable as that the physical avenues should be closed when in dreams,
or trance, or syncope, or under anaesthetics, the ego functions on the
subjective planes.

I hold, therefore, that here, more than anywhere else, is the source of
not only belief in the existence of the soul, but of the relatively
uniform conceptions everywhere attained. The common experience of man on
the one plane is as easily accounted for as on the other, and individual
experience differs no more widely in the one case than in the other. So
also is the persistence of the human type, or the _genus_, involved in the
one case no less than in the other.

All the agencies recognized in modern evolution tend to elevation only
through differentiation, and even the "eternal cell" of Weismann fails in
explaining permanency of form through any physical transmission. When