advises the authorities not to persecute the missionaries, giving it as his opinion that if Rationalists and Pantheists are tolerated, even in the pulpit, we also ought to be let alone. But let any thoughtful man, not to say Christian, or Christian minister, look at these passages in connexion with the general tone of all he has said on Methodism, and at the same time remember the tender infancy of the Methodist mission in Germany at the time these things were uttered, and let him say, whether in the gentlest judgment of charity, Professor Schaff did not do his utmost in all that, as an adopted American citizen he dare do, to bring our missionaries in Germany into disrepute, to hedge up their way, and to secure their return to America without fruit? All this appears the more wonderful, when we remember that the author himself has told us that full one-half of the Germans who come to this country since the revolutions of 1848 are Rationalists and Infidels, and leaves us to infer that multitudes of the same kind still remain in the fatherland.

We must not fail to mention, before concluding, that Rev. Mr Nippert, one of our missionaries in Germany, has replied to Dr. Schaff's misrepresentations of Methodism in a series of letters, published in the Christian Apologist, Cincinnati. These letters are pungent and direct in style, and in spirit, pious, becoming, and dignified.

Since the above article was written a translation of Dr. Schaff's book has appeared in this country. Among other differences between the original and the translation, we notice the following: On page 172 of the translation, he has slightly modified his account of the ecclesiastical constitution of Methodism. On pages 178 and 179, besides mentioning the period of "torpidity," &c., less specifically than in the original, he withdraws the admission, that "Methodism and Presbyterianism had contributed to the revival of the German Churches;" stating in general terms that those Churches were "awakened from their lethargy by the Anglo-American churches." On page 235 he has left out the strongest part of his most objectionable passage on Romanism; that, namely, in which he confesses for it his "powerful, historical, theological, artistic, and practicallyreligious respect."

The third part of the book, as it stood in the original, has been greatly altered and abridged in the translation, for reasons stated by the author.

ART. VII-LETTERS ON RECENT FRENCH LITERATURE.

LETTER VI.

PARIS, October, 1855.

TO THE EDITOR,-A volume has just been published in this city, of which the title and et ceteras are as follow: Du Sommeil au Point de vue Physiologique et Psychologique. Par ALBERT LEMOINE, Docteur ès Lettres, &c. Ouvrage Couronné, par l'Institut de France. 1 vol. Paris: 1855.

The programme of this treatise was proposed a year ago by the French Academy, as follows:-" 1. Of sleep in a psychological point of view. 2. What are the faculties of the soul that subsist, or are suspended, or considerably modified during sleep? 3. What is the essential difference between dreaming and thinking? The competitors will include in their researches somnambulism and its different species. 4. In natural somnambulism is there consciousness and personal identity? 5. Is artificial somnambulism (mesmerism) a fact? 6. If a fact, to study and describe it in its least contestable phenomena, to determine those of our faculties that are concerned in its operations, and to try to furnish a theory of this state of the soul.in accordance with the rules of a soundly philosophic method."

This statement of the thesis, entirely worthy of a learned body, was almost faultless in philosophical precision and subordination. The successful competitor has not done well in overlooking it. A new theory of the whole subject might alone necessitate a change of order, or at least of subdivision, in the details. But when the project went no deeper than the discussion, the development, and the direction upon certain points of facts already known, but unconnectedly, it was quite optional with the author to observe the order so well presented him. This he has by no means done, or only generally and vaguely. No more has he any systematic order of his own. Not, however, that the book appears confused in the perusal. It has the superficial clearness which is the forte of the French savant; it is precise in expression, it is perspicuous in arrangement, it is prolixly prudent in restricting inference and speculation; it has the sound but senile character too much in favour with the present Academy, the measure and moderation of which the public also mistake for method. The real confusion and incoherence of books of this class become observable only to the few who grasp the contents at once collectively and concisely. I must attempt to give a succinct abstract of a work of which the subject is of general interest, and is also a special object of American curiosity. In doing this, I shall avail myself of the division of the theme by the Academy to arrange correspondingly the author's results or conclusions. For these alone can be presented within the limits of a mere notice: the connexion between the series of solutions, or at least of answers, will be supplied, when briefly possible, only from the premises of the writer, so that this critical addition will not need distinction in the analysis.

1. To consider sleep "in the psychological point of view," (as proposed,) it is necessary to determine what it is in the physiological. In this respect it is

not a suspension merely of "the life of relation," that is to say, of the senses and other organs that act externally; it applies also to the internal organs of nutrition. The heart sleeps between the alternations of pulsation, the lungs between the alternations of respiration; the sleep or rest is only short because the effort is so too. The sole difference in case of the external organs of relation is that the sleep or the repose is, in this instance, much more durable; but it is only so in just proportion to the duration of the labour. The eye could not be closed at short intervals of vision without breaking up the images reflected by exterior objects; audition could not be subjected to a like rapid intermission without disturbing and distorting the impressions of sound; and so of the other senses respectively in their departments. If only one or more of them were liable to this condition, their fragmentary reports would be at variance with the others, and would thus establish in the percipient a sort of subjective chaos; if all the senses were thus intermittent, then the chaos would be also objective; their operation, without continuity enough to seize the images or the relations of external objects, could represent them in no conformity with the reality, and would make even the persistence of animal life upon the earth impossible. It was imperative, then, as a first condition of existence, not to say of rationality, that the repose of the external senses should, like their action, have longer periods. It is this periodic respite, coinciding naturally with the night, which relieves the principal of those organs from the sounds and images besetting them, that is called sleep, physiological sleep.

2. But this is not yet sleep "in the psychological point of view;" that is to say, the sleep of the soul. Here the answer is, The soul does not sleep at all; activity, like immortality, is its inseparable essence. None of its faculties are suspended during the sleep of the body; their operation is obstructed by the resistance of the physical organs, as the will to walk in a paralytic is not suspended but impeded; the modifications thus incurred by them is more or less considerable in proportion to the degree of torpor of the organs to be actuated. And this difference in the degrees of depth, and in the times of incidence, of slumber, which are known perpetually to vary in the divers organs of the senses, is the occasion, by the diversity of their resistance to the surging soul, of dreaming, and the other phenomena of sleep.

3. Is there, then, no essential difference between dreaming and thinking? None whatever in the act itself: the observed difference is in the results, and this proceeds from the three sources just alluded to. The mental vagaries of dreams, &c., are due to false or incomplete impressions received, according as the slumber is complete or only partial, from the interior organs of nutrition, or the exterior organs of relation, or the resistance to the consequent volitions of the soul. The first order of impressing agencies,—such as the motion of the blood, the digestion of the stomach, the secretion of the fluids, &c., which derive a special prominence from the suspension of the sensuous organs, give occasion to the most common class of dreams-the dreams of mere sensation. The organs of the senses proper, when lulled imperfectly, or only partially, and forced, in absence of external objects, to repeat to that extent their recent processes, affect the soul with the impressions, in of course a mutilated form, of the things that most or last engrossed it when the body was all awake; hence the dreams,

as they are called, of memory, perception, imagination, or as contrasting with the preceding class, the dreams of intelligence. The soul proceeding on the elements supplied it from these two sources, and with the confidence which, from the very uniformity of its procedure, it must repose in their reality as when the organs are awake, is often stimulated by them to reaction upon the body, and thus gives rise to a third order, the dreams of action or volition. But in all three classes the illusion which is put, in dreaming, upon the soul, is derived exclusively from the impressions; the soul itself and all its faculties remain the same as in its soundest thinking; its very error is an attestation of this identity of state, as the sounder a logician is the more he errs upon a false assumption; even he can be corrected only by control of the other senses; but in the dreamer a certain portion of these mental monitors sleep at their post. It is the same, in due proportion, with the waking visions of the monomaniac, and even the multitude are always dreamers in thoughts that range above the senses.

The dreams of action or volition, which hold the middle in this general series of the psychological phenomena of sleep, embrace, especially, a subdivision of the most remarkable of these phenomena, which have on this account been thought, as usual, of a nature quite peculiar. The sensational and intellectual dreams are known only to the dreamer; the volitional or active dreams express themselves externally, and strike the vulgar in proportion to their coarsely physical perceptibility. The same oversight of the gradation of intermediate stages, which passes equably those three principal divisions into one another, recurs again in the misapprehension of the extreme cases of the active dreams as being, in turn, entirely different phenomena. Thus the volitions of the soul, made in pursuance of the impressions received in sleep from the interior or the vegetative group of organs, are scarcely noticed except in the case of that derangement of the blood or stomach which produces the well-known vision called the nightmare. When the exterior or the muscular organs are the occasion of the volitions, and may have thus remained enough awake to obey, we have the active dreams of talking, of writing, &c., in sleep; but that of walking, as the more manifest, has named the class somnambulism. In the third place, if the impressions and the consequent volitions be confined to the cerebral organs of the intellect, we find the dreamer sometimes conscious that he is dreaming, the soul conducting dialogues and disputations with itself, resolving problems as in Franklin, philosophizing as in Condillac, and, in fact, diving into the distant and the future as in clairvoyance. In all these cases of active dreaming, as in the passive and perceptive orders, the soul's three faculties, to wit, sensation, volition, ratiocination, are and act the same essentially as when the body is awake; the results only are modified through the defect of the reports and the degree of the resistances presented by the bodily organs, whether vascular, muscular, or nervous.

The dreams of this last division are included quaintly by the Academy (no doubt too prudish to employ the quack names) in the term "natural somnambulism," and by "artificial somnambulism," it means mesmerizing or magnetizing. Its ensuing queries are, if in the former state the soul be conscious of its identity? and if the latter state be, in the first place, a fact?

4. Yes; personal identity continues in the somnambulist, in the ecstatic, in

the maniac, the dreamer, &c.; if not, indeed, in distinct consciousness, in recognition, in implication. When they mistake themselves for other persons, or as performing fantastic parts, or when they utterly forget such scenes on the return of the natural state, the illusion turns really only upon externals more or less intimate, upon localities, upon habiliments, upon sentiments, &c.; the nucleus of the individual remains essentially supposed. It is to this alone, moreover, that consciousness can apply. Consciousness is only one of the three elements of identity. The first of these is, that there be, objectively, a continuous existence; to be always the same, it is plainly necessary to be always, Consciousness, which is the second and the subjective element, applies but to the distinct instants of the duration; it recognises individuality, but by no means identity. The latter, being a relative notion, or embracing more than a single term, could be acquired only through a corresponding faculty, and accordingly the crowning element of personal identity is the relational condition of reminiscence. But this, connecting the successive consciousnesses at each instant as they arise, and placing thus implicit confidence at every moment in the general result, keeps no distinctive recollection of the several steps of the procedure, unless when marked by the concurrence of some more than ordinary incident. If this, however, do not seem unnatural, or quite at variance with all around it, it is through the medium of the circumstances, interwoven with the web of consciousnesses, and occasions no solution of continuity. If, on the contrary, the incident present a scene which is out of nature, or in complete discord with the reality of the situation, the trenchant contrast appears to insulate the ravished soul from its former self, the novel spectacle stands out so strikingly from the whole tenor of the reminiscence as to escape it, like unshaded objects that seem, in painting, to quit the canvass. Ignorance puts upon a peasant the like illusion in a picture, as organic malady puts upon a somnambulist as to his personal identity.

5. Artificial somnambulism or mesmerism is a fact, but with the following rather stringent limitations. The belief in it, as such, leaves undecided these inquiries: What are the cases that are fully verified, and are they new or out of nature? The cause or agency that produces them, which is it, physical or moral? What is the evidential value of the testimony of the dreamer as to the cause and to the character of his condition? One may believe in the production of artificial somnambulism without committing himself pro or con upon any one of these restrictive questions. They may, however, be all pronounced upon already with probability. In the production of the state in question, there is nothing unnatural or even new. Like other arts, it follows nature, and does not force her; it presented itself naturally, in antiquity, to priest and pythoness. The like effects are produced normally by opium or other narcotics. The agent of the magnetizer is not the absurd fluid pretended, but the morbid sensibility or predisposition of the subject. It is a waking case of the reactive class of dreams above explained, the soul's reaction in this instance being in imagination. It was the sense of control by the resistance of the dormant organ that threw the soul, we saw, into its visionary exaltations. But the supreme quality of an "operator" is, analogously to the organ, to impress the subject with a like sense of his control. The whole power of the magnetizers