Вольтер
A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 09
SOMNAMBULISTS AND DREAMERS
SECTION I
I have seen a somnambulist, but he contented himself with rising, dressing himself, making a bow, and dancing a minuet, all which he did very properly; and having again undressed himself, returned to bed and continued to sleep.
This comes not near the somnambulist of the "Encyclopædia." The last was a young seminarist, who set himself to compose a sermon in his sleep. He wrote it correctly, read it from one end to the other, or at least appeared to read it, made corrections, erased some lines, substituted others, and inserted an omitted word. He even composed music, noted it with precision, and after preparing his paper with his ruler, placed the words under the notes without the least mistake.
It is said, that an archbishop of Bordeaux has witnessed all these operations, and many others equally astonishing. It is to be wished that this prelate had affixed his attestation to the account, signed by his grand vicars, or at least by his secretary.
But supposing that this somnambulist has done all which is imputed to him, I would persist in putting the same queries to him as to a simple dreamer. I would say to him: You have dreamed more forcibly than another; but it is upon the same principle; one has had a fever only, the other a degree of madness; but both the one and the other have received ideas and sensations to which they have not attended. You have both done what you did not intend to do.
Of two dreamers, the one has not a single idea, the other a crowd; the one is as insensible as marble, while the other experiences desires and enjoyments. A lover composes a song on his mistress in a dream, and in his delirium imagines himself to be reading a tender letter from her, which he repeats aloud:
Scribit amatori meretrix; dat adultera munus
In noctis spatio miserorum vulnera durant.
– PETRONIUS, chap. civ.
Does anything pass within you during this powerful dream more than what passes every day when you are awake?
You, Mr. Seminarist, born with the gift of imitation, you have listened to some hundred sermons, and your brain is prepared to make them: moved by the talent of imitation, you have written them waking; and you are led by the same talent and impulse when you are asleep. But how have you been able to become a preacher in a dream? You went to sleep, without any desire to preach. Remember well the first time that you were led to compose the sketch of a sermon while awake. You thought not of it a quarter of an hour before; but seated in your chamber, occupied in a reverie, without any determinate ideas, your memory recalls, without your will interfering, the remembrance of a certain holiday; this holiday reminds you that sermons are delivered on that day; you remember a text; this text suggests an exordium; pens, ink, and paper, are lying near you; and you begin to write things you had not the least previous intention of writing. Such is precisely what came to pass in your noctambulism.
You believe yourself, both in the one and the other occupation, to have done only what you intended to do; and you have been directed without consciousness by all which preceded the writing of the sermon.
In the same manner when, on coming from vespers, you are shut up in your cell to meditate, you have no design to occupy yourself with the image of your fair neighbor; but it somehow or another intrudes; your imagination is inflamed; and I need not refer to the consequences. You may have experienced the same adventure in your sleep.
What share has your will had in all these modifications of sensation? The same that it has had in the coursing of your blood through your arteries and veins, in the action of your lymphatic vessels, or in the pulsation of your heart, or of your brain.
I have read the article on "Dreams" in the "Encyclopædia," and have understood nothing; and when I search after the cause of my ideas and actions, either in sleeping or waking, I am equally confounded.
I know well, that a reasoner who would prove to me when I wake, and when I am neither mad nor intoxicated, that I am then an active agent, would but slightly embarrass me; but I should be still more embarrassed if I undertook to prove to him that when he slept he was passive and a pure automaton.
Explain to me an animal who is a mere machine one-half of his life, and who changes his nature twice every twenty-four hours.
SECTION II
Letter on Dreams to the Editor of the Literary Gazette, August, 1764
Gentlemen: All the objects of science are within your jurisdiction; allow chimeras to be so also. "Nil sub sole novum" – "nothing new under the sun". Thus it is not of anything which passes in noonday that I am going to treat, but of that which takes place during the night. Be not alarmed; it is only with dreams that I concern myself.
I confess, gentlemen, that I am constantly of the opinion of the physician of M. Pourceaugnac; he inquires of his patient the nature of his dreams, and M. Pourceaugnac, who is not a philosopher, replies that they are of the nature of dreams. It is most certain however, with no offence to your Limousin, that uneasy and horrible dreams denote pain either of body or mind; a body overcharged with aliment, or a mind occupied with melancholy ideas when awake.
The laborer who has waked without chagrin, and fed without excess, sleeps sound and tranquil, and dreams disturb him not; so long as he is in this state, he seldom remembers having a dream – a truth which I have fully ascertained on my estate in Herefordshire. Every dream of a forcible nature is produced by some excess, either in the passions of the soul, or the nourishment of the body; it seems as if nature intended to punish us for them, by suggesting ideas, and making us think in spite of ourselves. It may be inferred from this, that those who think the least are the most happy; but it is not that conclusion which I seek to establish.
We must acknowledge, with Petronius, "Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit." I have known advocates who have pleaded in dreams; mathematicians who have sought to solve problems; and poets who have composed verses. I have made some myself, which are very passable. It is therefore incontestable, that consecutive ideas occur in sleep, as well as when we are awake, which ideas as certainly come in spite of us. We think while sleeping, as we move in our beds, without our will having anything to do either in the motive or the thought. Your Father Malebranche is right in asserting that we are not able to give ourselves ideas. For why are we to be masters of them, when waking, more than during sleep? If your Malebranche had stopped there, he would have been a great philosopher; he deceived himself only by going too far: of him we may say:
Processit longe flammantia mœnia mundi.
– LUCRETIUS, i, 74.
His vigorous and active mind was hurled
Beyond the flaming limits of this world.
– CREECH.
For my part, I am persuaded that the reflection that our thoughts proceed not from ourselves, may induce the visit of some very good thoughts. I will not, however, undertake to develop mine, for fear of tiring some readers, and astonishing others.
I simply beg to say two or three words in relation to dreams. Have you not found, like me, that they are the origin of the opinion so generally diffused throughout antiquity, touching spectres and manes? A man profoundly afflicted at the death of his wife or his son, sees them in his sleep; he speaks to them; they reply to him; and to him they have certainly appeared. Other men have had similar dreams; it is therefore impossible to deny that the dead may return; but it is certain, at the same time, that these deceased, whether inhumed, reduced to ashes, or buried in the abyss of the sea, have not been able to reserve their bodies; it is, therefore, the soul which we have seen. This soul must necessarily be extended, light, and impalpable, because in speaking to it we have not been able to embrace it: "Effugit imago par levibus ventis." It is moulded and designed from the body that it inhabits, since it perfectly resembles it. The name of shade or manes is given it; from all which a confused idea remains in the head, which differs itself so much more because no one can understand it.
Dreams also appear to me to have been the sensible origin of primitive prophecy or prediction. What more natural or common than to dream that a person dear to us is in danger of dying, or that we see him expiring? What more natural, again, than that such a person may really die soon after this ominous dream of his friend? Dreams which have come to pass are always predictions which no one can doubt, no account being taken of the dreams which are never fulfilled; a single dream accomplished has more effect than a hundred which fail. Antiquity abounds with these examples. How constructed are we for the reception of error! Day and night unite to deceive us!
You see, gentlemen, that by attending to these ideas, we may gather some fruit from the book of my compatriot, the dreamer; but I finish, lest you should take me myself for a mere visionary.
Yours,JOHN DREAMER.
SECTION III
Of Dreams
According to Petronius, dreams are not of divine origin, but self-formed:
Somnia qua mentes ludunt volitantibus umbris,
Non delumbra deum nec ab æthere numina mittunt,
Sed sibi quisque facit.
But how, all the senses being defunct in sleep, does there remain an internal one which retains consciousness? How is it, that while the eyes see not, the ears hear not, we notwithstanding understand in our dreams? The hound renews the chase in a dream: he barks, follows his prey, and is in at the death. The poet composes verses in his sleep; the mathematician examines his diagram; and the metaphysician reasons well or ill; of all which there are striking examples.
Are they only the organs of the machine which act? Is it the pure soul, submitted to the empire of the senses, enjoying its faculties at liberty?
If the organs alone produce dreams by night, why not alone produce ideas by day? If the soul, pure and tranquil, acting for itself during the repose of the senses, is the sole cause of our ideas while we are sleeping, why are all these ideas usually irregular, unreasonable, and incoherent? What! at a time when the soul is least disturbed, it is so much disquieted in its imagination? Is it frantic when at liberty? If it was produced with metaphysical ideas, as so many sages assert who dream with their eyes open, its correct and luminous ideas of being, of infinity, and of all the primary principles, ought to be revealed in the soul with the greatest energy when the body sleeps. We should never be good philosophers except when dreaming.
Whatever system we embrace, whatever our vain endeavors to prove that the memory impels the brain, and that the brain acts upon the soul, we must allow that our ideas come, in sleep, independently of our will. It is therefore certain that we can think seven or eight hours running without the least intention of doing so, and even without being certain that we think. Pause upon that, and endeavor to divine what there is in this which is animal.
Dreams have always formed a great object of superstition, and nothing is more natural. A man deeply affected by the sickness of his mistress dreams that he sees her dying; she dies the next day; and of course the gods have predicted her death.
The general of an army dreams that he shall gain a battle; he subsequently gains one; the gods had decreed that he should be a conqueror. Dreams which are accomplished are alone attended to. Dreams form a great part of ancient history, as also of oracles.
The "Vulgate" thus translates the end of Leviticus, xix, 26: "You shall not observe dreams." But the word "dream" exists not in the Hebrew; and it would be exceedingly strange, if attention to dreams was reproved in the same book in which it is said that Joseph became the benefactor of Egypt and his family, in consequence of his interpretation of three dreams.
The interpretation of dreams was a thing so common, that the supposed art had no limits, and the interpreter was sometimes called upon to say what another person had dreamed. Nebuchadnezzar, having forgotten his dream, orders his Magi to say what it was he had dreamed, and threatened them with death if they failed; but the Jew Daniel, who was in the school of the Magi, saved their lives by divining at once what the king had dreamed, and interpreting it. This history, and many others, may serve to prove that the laws of the Jews did not forbid oneiromancy, that is to say, the science of dreams.
SECTION IV
Lausanne, Oct. 25, 1757.
In one of my dreams, I supped with M. Touron, who appeared to compose verses and music, which he sang to us. I addressed these four lines to him in my dream:
Mon cher Touron, que tu m'enchantes
Par la douceur de tes accens!
Que tes vers sont doux et coulans!
Tu les fais comme tu tes chantes.
Thy gentle accents, Touron dear,
Sound most delightful to my ear!
With how much ease the verses roll,
Which flow, while singing, from thy soul!
In another dream, I recited the first canto of the "Henriade" quite different from what it is. Yesterday, I dreamed that verses were recited at supper, and that some one pretended they were too witty. I replied that verses were entertainments given to the soul, and that ornaments are necessary in entertainments.
I have therefore said things in my sleep which I should have some difficulty to say when awake; I have had thoughts and reflections, in spite of myself, and without the least voluntary operation on my own part, and nevertheless combined my ideas with sagacity, and even with genius. What am I, therefore, if not a machine?
SOPHIST
A geometrician, a little severe, thus addressed us one day: There is nothing in literature more dangerous than rhetorical sophists; and among these sophists none are more unintelligible and unworthy of being understood than the divine Plato.
The only useful idea to be found in him, is that of the immortality of the soul, which was already admitted among cultivated nations; but, then, how does he prove this immortality?
We cannot too forcibly appeal to this proof, in order to correctly appreciate this famous Greek. He asserts, in his "Phædon" that death is the opposite of life, that death springs from life, and the living from the dead, consequently that our souls will descend beneath the earth when we die.
If it is true that the sophist Plato, who gives himself out for the enemy of all sophists, reasons always thus, what have been all these pretended great men, and in what has consisted their utility?
The grand defect of the Platonic philosophy is the transformation of abstract ideas into realities. A man can only perform a fine action, because a beauty really exists, which is its archetype.
We cannot perform any action, without forming an idea of the action – therefore these ideas exist I know not where, and it is necessary to study them.
God formed an idea of the world before He created it. This was His logos: the world, therefore, is the production of the logos!
What disputes, how many vain and even sanguinary contests, has this manner of argument produced upon earth! Plato never dreamed that his doctrine would be able, at some future period, to divide a church which in his time was not in existence.
To conceive a just contempt for all these foolish subtilties, read Demosthenes, and see if in any one of his harangues he employs one of these ridiculous sophisms. It is a clear proof that, in serious business, no more attention is paid to these chimeras than in a council of state to theses of theology.
Neither will you find any of this sophistry in the speeches of Cicero. It was a jargon of the schools, invented to amuse idleness – the quackery of mind.
SOUL
SECTION I
This is a vague and indeterminate term, expressing an unknown principle of known effects, which we feel in ourselves. This word "soul" answers to the "anima" of the Latins – to the "pneuma" of the Greeks – to the term which each and every nation has used to express what they understood no better than we do.
In the proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived from it, it signifies that which animates. Thus people say, the soul of men, of animals, and sometimes of plants, to denote their principle of vegetation and life. This word has never been uttered with any but a confused idea, as when it is said in Genesis: "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul"; and: "The soul of animals is in the blood"; and: "Stay not my soul."
Thus the soul was taken for the origin and the cause of life, and for life itself. Hence all known nations long imagined that everything died with the body. If anything can be discerned with clearness in the chaos of ancient histories, it seems that the Egyptians were at least the first who made a distinction between the intelligence and the soul; and the Greeks learned from them to distinguish their "nous" and their "pneuma." The Latins, after the example of the Greeks, distinguished "animus" and "anima"; and we have, too, our soul and our understanding. But are that which is the principle of our life, and that which is the principle of our thoughts, two different things? Does that which causes us to digest, and which gives us sensation and memory, resemble that which is the cause of digestion in animals, and of their sensations and memory?
Here is an eternal object for disputation: I say an eternal object, for having no primitive notion from which to deduce in this investigation, we must ever continue in a labyrinth of doubts and feeble conjectures.
We have not the smallest step on which to set our foot, to reach the slightest knowledge of what makes us live and what makes us think. How should we? For we must then have seen life and thought enter a body. Does a father know how he produced his son? Does a mother know how she conceived him? Has anyone ever been able to divine how he acts, how he wakes, or how he sleeps? Does anyone know how his limbs obey his will? Has anyone discovered by what art his ideas are traced in his brain, and issue from it at his command? Feeble automata, moved by the invisible hand which directs us on the stage of this world, which of us has ever perceived the thread which guides us?
We dare to put in question, whether the intelligent soul is spirit or matter; whether it is created before us, or proceeds from nothing at our birth; whether, after animating us for a day on this earth, it lives after us in eternity. These questions appear sublime; what are they? Questions of blind men asking one another: What is light?
When we wish to have a rude knowledge of a piece of metal, we put it on the fire in a crucible; but have we any crucible wherein to put the soul? It is spirit, says one; but what is spirit? Assuredly, no one knows. This is a word so void of meaning, that to tell what spirit is, you are obliged to say what it is not. The soul is matter, says another; but what is matter? We know nothing of it but a few appearances and properties; and not one of these properties, not one of these appearances, can bear the least affinity to thought.
It is something distinct from matter, you say; but what proof have you of this? Is it because matter is divisible and figurable, and thought is not? But how do you know that the first principles of matter are divisible and figurable? It is very likely that they are not; whole sects of philosophers assert that the elements of matter have neither figure nor extent. You triumphantly exclaim: Thought is neither wood, nor stone, nor sand, nor metal; therefore, thought belongs not to matter. Weak and presumptuous reasoners! Gravitation is neither wood, nor sand, nor metal, nor stone; nor is motion, or vegetation, or life, any of all these; yet life, vegetation, motion, gravitation, are given to matter. To say that God cannot give thought to matter, is to say the most insolently absurd thing that has ever been advanced in the privileged schools of madness and folly. We are not assured that God has done this; we are only assured that He can do it. But of what avail is all that has been said, or all that will be said, about the soul? What avails it that it has been called "entelechia," quintessence, flame, ether – that it has been believed to be universal, uncreated, transmigrant?
Of what avail, in these questions inaccessible to reason, are the romances of our uncertain imaginations? What avails it, that the fathers in the four primitive ages believed the soul to be corporeal? What avails it that Tertullian, with a contradictoriness that was familiar to him, decided that it is at once corporeal, figured, and simple? We have a thousand testimonies of ignorance, but not one which affords us a ray of probability.
How, then, shall we be bold enough to affirm what the soul is? We know certainly that we exist, that we feel, that we think. Seek we to advance one step further – we fall into an abyss of darkness; and in this abyss, we have still the foolish temerity to dispute whether this soul, of which we have not the least idea, is made before us or with us, and whether it is perishable or immortal?
The article on "Soul," and all articles belonging to metaphysics, should begin with a sincere submission to the indubitable tenets of the Church. Revelation is doubtless much better than philosophy. Systems exercise the mind, but faith enlightens and guides it.
Are there not words often pronounced of which we have but a very confused idea, or perhaps no idea at all? Is not the word "soul" one of these? When the tongue of a pair of bellows is out of order, and the air, escaping through the valve, is not driven with violence towards the fire, the maid-servant says: "The soul of the bellows is burst." She knows no better, and the question does not at all disturb her quiet.
The gardener uses the expression, "Soul of the plants"; and cultivates them very well without knowing what the term means.
The musical-instrument maker places, and shifts forward or backward, the soul of a violin, under the bridge, in the interior of the instrument: a sorry bit of wood more or less gives it or takes from it a harmonious soul.
We have several manufactures in which the workmen give the appellation of "soul" to their machines; but they are never heard to dispute about the word: it is otherwise with philosophers.
The word "soul," with us, signifies in general that which animates. Our predecessors, the Celts, gave their soul the name of "seel," of which the English have made soul, while the Germans retain "seel"; and it is probable that the ancient Teutons and the ancient Britons had no university quarrels about this expression.
The Greeks distinguished three sorts of souls: "Psyche," signifying the sensitive soul – the soul of the senses; and hence it was that Love, the son of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and that she loved him so tenderly; "Pneuma," the breath which gave life and motion to the whole machine, and which we have rendered by "spiritus" – spirit – a vague term, which has received a thousand different acceptations: and lastly, "nous," intelligence.
Thus we possess three souls, without having the slightest notion of any one of them. St. Thomas Aquinas admits these three souls in his quality of peripatetic, and distinguishes each of the three into three parts.
"Psyche" was in the breast; "Pneuma" was spread throughout the body; and "Nous" was in the head. There was no other philosophy in our schools until the present day; and woe to the man who took one of these souls for another!
In this chaos of ideas, there was however a foundation. Men had clearly perceived that in their passions of love, anger, fear, etc., motions were excited within them; the heart and the liver were the seat of the passions. When thinking deeply, one feels a laboring in the organs of the head; "therefore, the intellectual soul is in the brain. Without respiration there is no vegetation, no life; therefore, the vegetative soul is in the breast, which receives the breath of the air."
When men had seen in their sleep their dead relatives or friends, they necessarily sought to discover what had appeared to them. It was not the body, which had been consumed on a pile or swallowed up in the sea and eaten by the fishes. However, they would declare it was something, for they had seen it; the dead man had spoken; the dreamer had questioned him. Was it "Psyche"; was it "Pneuma"; was it "Nous" with whom he had conversed in his sleep? Then a phantom was imagined – a slight figure; it was "skia" – it was "daimonos" – a shade of the manes; a small soul of air and fire, extremely slender, wandering none knew where.
In after times, when it was determined to sound the matter, the undisputed result was, that this soul was corporeal, and all antiquity had no other idea of it. At length came Plato, who so subtilized this soul, that it was doubted whether he did not entirely separate it from matter; but the problem was never resolved until faith came to enlighten us.
In vain do the materialists adduce the testimony of some fathers of the Church who do not express themselves with exactness. St. Irenæus says that the soul is but the breath of life, that it is incorporeal only in comparison with the mortal body, and that it retains the human figure in order that it may be recognized.
In vain does Tertullian express himself thus:
"The corporality of the soul shines forth in the Gospel. 'Corporalitas animæ in ipso evangelio relucesseit.'" For if the soul had not a body, the image of the soul would not have the image of the body.
In vain does he even relate the vision of a holy woman who had seen a very brilliant soul of the color of the air.
In vain does Tatian expressly say:
Ψυχὴ μὲν οὖν εἰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων πυλυμερής ἐστιν
– "The soul of man is composed of several parts."
In vain do they adduce St. Hilary, who said in later times: "There is nothing created which is not corporeal, neither in heaven nor on earth; neither visible nor invisible; all is formed of elements; and souls, whether they inhabit a body or are without a body, have always a corporeal substance."
In vain does St. Ambrose, in the fourth century, say: "We know nothing but what is material, excepting only the ever-venerable Trinity."
The whole body of the Church has decided that the soul is immaterial. These holy men had fallen into an error then universal; they were men: but they were not mistaken concerning immortality, because it is evidently announced in the Gospels.
So evident is our need of the decision of the infallible Church on these points of philosophy, that indeed we have not of ourselves any sufficient notion of what is called pure spirit, nor of what is called matter. Pure spirit is an expression which gives us no idea; and we are acquainted with matter only by a few phenomena. So little do we know of it, that we call it substance, which word "substance" means that which is beneath; but this beneath will eternally be concealed from us; this beneath is the Creator's secret, and this secret of the Creator is everywhere. We do not know how we receive life, how we give it, how we grow, how we digest, how we sleep, how we think, nor how we feel. The great difficulty is, to comprehend how a being, whatsoever it be, has thoughts.
SECTION II
Locke's Doubts concerning the Soul
The author of the article on "Soul," in the "Encyclopædia," who has scrupulously followed Jacquelot, teaches us nothing. He also rises up against Locke, because the modest Locke has said:
"Perhaps we shall never be capable of knowing whether a material being thinks or not; for this reason – that it is impossible for us to discover, by the contemplation of our own ideas, 'without revelation,' whether God has not given to some portion of matter, disposed as He thinks fit, the power of perceiving and thinking; or whether He has joined and united to matter so disposed, an immaterial and thinking substance. For with regard to our notions, it is no less easy for us to conceive that God can, if He pleases, add to an idea of matter the faculty of thinking, than to comprehend that He joins to it another substance with the faculty of thinking; since we know not in what thought consists, nor to what kind of substance this all-powerful Being has thought fit to grant this power, which could be created only by virtue of the good-will and pleasure of the Creator. I do not see that there is any contradiction in God – that thinking, eternal, and all-powerful Being – giving, if He wills it, certain degrees of feeling, perception, and thought, to certain portions of matter, created and insensible, which He joins together as he thinks fit."
This was speaking like a profound, religious, and modest man. It is known what contests he had to maintain concerning this opinion, which he appeared to have hazarded, but which was really no other than a consequence of the conviction he felt of the omnipotence of God, and the weakness of man. He did not say that matter thought; but he said that we do not know enough to demonstrate that it is impossible for God to add the gift of thought to the unknown being called "matter," after granting to it those of gravitation and of motion, which are equally incomprehensible.
Assuredly, Locke was not the only one who advanced this opinion; it was that of all the ancients – regarding the soul only as very subtile matter, they consequently affirmed that matter could feel and think.
Such was the opinion of Gassendi, as we find in his objections to Descartes. "It is true," says Gassendi, "that you know that you think; but you, who think, know not of what kind of substance you are. Thus, though the operation of thought is known to you, the principle of your essence is hidden from you, and you do not know what is the nature of that substance, one of the operations of which is to think. You resemble a blind man who, feeling the heat of the sun, and being informed that it is caused by the sun, should believe himself to have a clear and distinct idea of that luminary, because, if he were asked what the sun is, he could answer, that it is a thing which warms…"
