Some more phenomena of sleep and dream : paper read to the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox.
- Cox, Edward W. (Edward William), 1809-1879.
- Date:
- [1877]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Some more phenomena of sleep and dream : paper read to the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![ifc wakes him or only suggests a dream, as if it was the report of a cannon. A loud sound will as often seem to him as nothing more than a whisper. This fact, familiar to all of us, proves that the senses are not the rectifiers of the mental actions, as some psychologists have suggested. Hence it may be inferred that the principal agent in the direction of the human mechanism during waking life is not the senses, for they are only partially suspended in sleep, —nor the brain, for that is running riot in all the impossibilities and incongruities of dreams—but something which is neither the senses nor the brain, which is inde- pendent of either, and whose control alike of mind and body is suspended in the condition of sleep. The imme- diate agent of this something is the Will. But the Will is not an entity; it is only the expression of some entity, i The Will is only the force which some entity directs to some intelligent object. What then is the rational and scientific conclusion from these facts ? Is it not that, if there be such an entity, that is neither brain nor body but sometimes controls both and sometimes is severed from both, a reasonable presump- tion arises that this entity is the Conscious Self, a thing distinct from the brain and the body, from which it is then severed more or less. The proposition is plain and simple. There is a something-which is conscious of what the brain is doing in the wild work of dream; this something is that we recognise as the Conscious Self, the I—the you—the individual being, of which the sleeping structure is only the machine by means of which that being—call it Soul, if you please—maintains its communication with the mate- rial world in which the present stage of its existence is to bo passed. I__liope I am not illogical or unscientific in advancing this as another proof of the being of a non-molecular [173] i](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22443927_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
