Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

188 DREABMING.
tions, to all the different employments of our intellectual
powers: -
"WVhat we now call genius begins, not where rules, abstractedly taken, end; but where known, vulgar, and trite rules have
no longer any place. It must of necessity be, that a work of
genius, as well as every other effect, as it must have its cause,
must likewise have its rules; it cannot be by chance, that excellences are produced with any constancy, or any certainty, for
this is not the nature of chance; but the rules by which men of
extraordinary parts, and such as are called men of genius, work,
are either such as they discover by their own peculiar observation, or of such a nice texture as not easily to admit handling
or expressing in words.
"Unsubstantial, however, as these rules may seem, and difficult as it may be to convey them in writing, they are still seen
aid felt in the mind of the artist; and he works from them with
as much certainty, as if they were embodied, as I may say, upon
paper. It is true, these refined principles cannot be always
made palpable, like the more gross rules of art; yet it does not
follow, but that the mind may be put in such a train, that it
shall perceive, by a kind of scientific sense, that propriety which
words can but very feebly suggest." - (Discourses by Sir
Joshua Reynolds.)
V. Application of the principles stated in the foregoing sections
of this chapter? to explain the phenomena of dreaming. - With
respect to the phenomena of dreaming, three different questions
may be proposed. First, What is the state of the mind in
sleep? or, in other words, what faculties then continue to operate,
and what faculties are then suspended? Secondly, How far
do our dreams appear to be influenced by our bodily sensations;
and in what respects do they vary, according to the different
conditions of the body in health, and in sickness? Thirdly,
What is the change which sleep produces on those parts of the
body, with which our mental operations are more immediately
connected; and how does this change operate, in diversifying so
remarkably the phenomena which our minds then exhibit, from
those of which we are conscious in our waking hours? Of these