On Dreams

dred years ago. Voltaire would not believe the scientists even when they found the fossil of a fish; we can only imagine what he would have said if a scientist like Sir Oliver Lodge had offered to introduce him to the phantom of a man. The whole modern movement, from Hume to Huxley, was supposed to have awakened men out of every sort of dream, and even classed their spiritual visions and revelations with their dreams. I know not what the men of that movement would have thought if they had found a more modern generation actually believing in visions and revelations merely because they had been communicated in dreams.

Yet this is the general impression produced by a Symposium on Dreams, and containing contributions by many brilliant and distinguished men, especially of the most modern sort. They do not, indeed, state their credulity in the form of a creed; but a great deal of modern liberality merely consists of leaving out the creed and keeping the credulity. The things that some of them say, both in this symposium and elsewhere, are very arresting and extraordinary. Mr. Algernon Blackwood, indeed, is an acknowledged and even authoritative student of mysticism; and, perhaps for that very reason, his story is the most moderate and his comments the most cautious. He definitely attests to a case of a thing which he had lost, he knew not where, and how its exact hiding-place was revealed to him in a dream and afterwards verified as a fact. But he takes it lightly and almost humorously, as is the way of experienced mystics, and is willing to refer it to some ordinary operation of the subconsciousness. But Miss Storm Jameson records a case in which she was completely puzzled by a practical problem in daily life, from which she thought she had explored every possible avenue of escape; after which she dreamed an apparently irrelevant, but beautiful and consoling dream,- full of strange gardens and wonderful white flowers, to awaken in the morning with an entirely new and quite practical expedient blazing clearly in her mind. She does not seem to have the least doubt that it was the one and only right solution, and that some unknown beneficence had revealed it to her in her sleep. I am not attempting to value these experiences in relation to any theory: I am merely remarking the way in which the most modern people can accept the direction of dreams, and treat such a mystical thing entirely as a practical thing.

The most remarkable statement is that of Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson, the vigorous artist and critic. He begins with a rigid denial of all belief in the supernatural, and especially in a life after death. I do not quite understand what he means by saying: "Having been near death more often than many mortals, I have reason to believe it is one long eternal sleep." I do not see what having been near death can possibly have to do with it, one way or the other. There is no parallel to the difference between death and life; but even touching the differences of living men, the argument would be a fallacy. There may be many a millionaire who, on looking back at his most brilliant financial triumphs and expedients, may be conscious that on several occasions he was very near to Dartmoor. But I should not agree that the millionaire, reflecting comfortably at the CarlRitz, was necessarily an authority on the plan and inside arrangements of Dartmoor, or qualified to advise convicts on how to escape from Dartmoor. And, as I say, there is no comparison between the secrets of Dartmoor and the secrets of death. I think he would see the fallacy at once, if it were used on the other side; if an Army chaplain were to say that he now knew all about Purgatory and Paradise because a shell missed him by an inch or the doctors despaired of him in hospital. But his preliminary statement of complete scepticism is none the less valuable in relation to what follows. Even more valuable is his realization of a historical fact that is very rarely realized. tcMy main sympathy with Christianity is that originally it cleared the dark minds of Greece and Rome of omens, portents, and all the terrors of superstition."

Then he goes on to state, in the most calm and lucid and interesting manner, that a number o£ his own pictures, were quite certainly prophetic, and that this prophetic power had generally come to him in dreams. He even says that he has painted and exhibited pictures which he himself dislikes; in obedience to the direction of dreams, and because he finds they have some superhuman and supernormal quality, to attract or repel, which can only come out of the power which directs his dreams. This, it will be noted, really goes a good way beyond what has been heard from the mystics who are regarded as most mystical, or even regarded as most mad. William Blake drew images from" what would be called invisible models, but he never said he disliked drawing them or that he disliked the drawings when they were done. He wrote and published poems of which he said that "the authors are in Eternity," but he never felt as if the authors were bad authors, or the poems bad poems. I use the word "bad," in this case, of course, in the merely popular sense of not pleasing the normal taste, not merely of the public, but even of the poet or the painter. The state of things described by this stern sceptic is, in fact, very much more extraordinary than any state of things that has generally been described by religious enthusiasts or ecstatic believers. He, much more than they, may be described as believing without understanding; or, perhaps, as obeying without believing. He is driven, indeed, to what is perhaps only a verbal inconsistency, for he begins by announcing that he definitely disbelieves in the supernatural, and ends by saying that he believes in something "which is either subconscious or supernatural"; passing from the negative at least to the agnostic view. But I fully realize that words must be hard to manage in describing so strange and even extreme a state of transcendentalism. Certainly, nobody could say it is a state of dull and stolid materialism. There seems to me, if anything, rather more danger that a man obeying the voice of a nameless destiny, which speaks only in dreams, may also need to be delivered, like the Greeks and Romans, from "omens, portents, and all the terrors of superstition."

XXI On the Fossil of a Fanatic

IN dealing with such things as Prohibition, I have sometimes had occasion to mention Puritanism. Disputes have arisen about this word, and about how far it is fair to associate it at least with a rnild shade of pessimism. Sporadic attempts are made to modify this strong popular impression; and I saw an article the other day which largely turned upon a statement that Calvin was allowed to play with darts. As I have not the least desire to be unfair to Puritans, I think I should like to sum up what seems to me the substantial historical truth of the matter; and the real point of the whole story. So far as I am concerned, the point is not so much against Calvin as against Calvinism; and not so much even against Calvinism as against that much less logical Modernism, which has taught everybody in our time that religious error does not matter. It matters very much in two ways; and Puritanism is a striking historical example of both. First, something that might well seem to sensible people to be only a fine shade of thought, merely theoretical and theological, does in fact change the mind. It produces a mood which does darken the