mer, has wrought in a similar
manner and still more widely. It has been a common superstition
with barbarous nations in every part of the world, from Timbuctoo
to Siberia, to suppose that dreams are real

2 Lib. i. cap. 60.

3 De Boismont, Rational History of Hallucinations, ch. 15:
Of Hallucinations considered in a Psychological, Historical,
and Religious Point of View.

adventures which the soul passes through, flying abroad while the
body lies, a dormant shell, wrapped in slumber. The power of this
influence in nourishing a copious credulity may easily be
imagined.

The origin of many notions touching a future state, found in
literature, is to be traced to those rambling thoughts and poetic
reveries with which even the most philosophical minds, in certain
moods, indulge themselves. For example, Sir Isaac Newton "doubts
whether there be not superior intelligencies who, subject to the
Supreme, oversee and control the revolutions of the heavenly
bodies." And Goethe, filled with sorrow by the death of Wieland,
musing on the fate of his departed friend, solemnly surmised that
he had become the soul of a world in some far realm of space. The
same mental exercises which supply the barbarian superstitions
reappear in disciplined minds, on a higher plane and in more
refined forms. Culture and science do not deliver us from all
illusion and secure us sober views conformed to fact. Still, what
we think amid the solid realities of waking life, fancy in her
sleep disjointedly reverberates from hollow fields of dream. The
metaphysician or theologian, instead of resting contented with
mere snatches and glimpses, sets himself deliberately to reason
out a complete theory. In these elaborate efforts many an opinion
and metaphor, plausible or absurd, sweet or direful, is born and
takes its place. There is in the human mind a natural passion for
congruity and completeness, a passion extremely fertile in
complementary products. For example, the early Jewish notion of
literally sitting down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,
in the resurrection, was gradually developed by accretion of
assisting particulars into all the details of a consummate
banquet, at which Leviathan was to be the fish, Behemoth the
roast, and so on.4 In the construction of doctrines or of
discourses, one thought suggests, one premise or conclusion
necessitates, another. This genetic application is sometimes
plainly to be seen even in parts of incoher