He did not walk in his sleep every nignt, but passed sometimes six or seven weeks, without a fit of somnambulism. Before the fit begins he utters broken words, sits up in his bed, abruptly begins to talk with more coherence, then rises, and goes wherever the nature of his dream prompts him. Having risen one night with the intention of eating grapes, he left the house, went through the town, and passed on to a vineyard, where he expected good cheer. He was followed by several persons, who kept at a distance from him, one of whom fired a pistol, the noise of which immediately awoke him, and he fell down in a fit. Once he was observed dressing himself in the dark. His clothes were on a large table mixed with those of some other persons. At last a light was brought: he separated the clothes and dressed himself with sufficient precision. Another time he got out of bed and finished a piece of writing, in order, as he said, to please his master. It consisted of three kinds of writing, text, half-text, and small writing, each of them performed with the proper pen. He drew, in the corner of the same paper, the figure of a hat. He then asked for a penknife, to take out a blot of ink which he had made between two letters; and he erased it without injuring either. Lastly, he made some calculations with great accuracy.

Now, in this case of Devaux's, and in all such cases of somnambulism, there is an approach to the awaking state of the mind: they afford an intermediate step between sleep and vigilance, and differ only from madness in the time of their duration. For in somnambulism the will has recovered great part of its dominion over the body and mind which it had lost in perfect sleep; for we see that a somnambulist walks about, and thinks, and reasons, and acts, with a great share of precision. The difference between a somnambulist and a man awake, is, that the first distinguishes between his sensations and perceptions only in part, the latter entirely. Devaux got up and wrote a copy for his master, -he saw the pen and ink, and the writing, and various other things, as plainly as if he had been awake; but he did not attend to the appearance of the room, the beds,

and the faces about him; he most probably thought he was in school, with his school-fellows about him, and so far he was under the influence of his conceptions. This is just the case with innumerable madmen we see in Bedlam. Somnambulism continued would, so far as I can see, differ nothing from madness. Dreaming differs from madness only in the diminution of the power of the will; excepting that there are very few madmen in Bedlam so mad as a dreamer. There seems also to be a certain connection between the augmented power of conception and the diminished power of will; so that a man becomes, in sleeping, motionless, exactly as he becomes mad, and regains his power of moving as he regains his power of moving for a rational purpose. This happens, luckily enough for dreamers, who would otherwise infallibly break their limbs every time they dreamed; and for the somnambulist, who, when he can move about, has acquired a considerable share of reason: so that we may perceive, if these observations be true, the following phenomena to take place, exactly in proportion as the outward senses lose their power, and the conceptions acquire a greater vigor than is natural to them:revery, absence, somnambulism, madness, and sleep; and by reversing the scale, the conceptions gradually lose their force, and the sensations gain it.

A similar mistake is often seen to take place between the ideas of memory and those of conception; they are in many instances confounded together. Children are often detected in falsehoods which evidently originate from this cause they have not learned to distinguish between their memory and their conception, and therefore believe they have seen and heard things which they have only fancied. In the same manner, very old men, approaching to their second infancy, are apt to confound what they have only conceived, with what they have remembered; and for this cause to become somewhat unintelligible to those who converse with them.

Nature has probably made a strong original difference between our sensations and conceptions; but whatever the original difference may be, it is considerably strengthened by habit. Every year we live, till our faculties

decline, the difference becomes more and more considerable, and is, of course, much less remarkable in infancy than in manhood. This I take to be the reason why children can amuse themselves so well and so long with dolls, and talk to them as if they were alive: not that I suppose the deception is ever perfect, but that their conceptions approaching much nearer to their sensations, communicate more of the interest of real life. As the child gets older, and the difference between these two classes of ideas more wide, the wooden darling is tossed aside, because the conception has become a more languid and uninteresting representative of reality. There seems to be a regular process carried on in the mind throughout its whole existence, by which ideas of memory are converted into ideas of conception. If a poet writes two or three hundred verses, very many of the combinations of words, perhaps whole verses, will be faithful copies of what he has once remembered, and which, divested of all the marks of their origin, have reappeared to the writer as productions of his own brain. In the same manner, in a fancy landscape, or in grounds laid out by a man of taste, many of the combinations are in all probability copies of real scenes, which the person who introduced them could once have referred to some particular spot, but have now become his own. property, from an inability to discover their former master,-like domestic animals which run away into the woods, and belong to whoever can catch them.

I shall mention only one more fact respecting conception, and it is a curious one, for which no reason can be given but that such is the constitution of our nature;—I mean, the great facility we all exhibit of conceiving the impressions of one sense better than those of another. It is, for instance, much easier to conceive any sight, than to conceive a taste, or a smell, or a feeling, or a sound. Sight is indeed so much the favorite and impressive sense, that almost the whole language of metaphysics is borrowed from it. Let any person attempt to conceive the smell or the taste of a melon,-they will find their conceptions of those sensations extremely faint;

D

but they will without difficulty form a clear conception of its figure and color.

To epitomize then the tedious account I have given of this class of ideas, we must remember the threefold division of ideas with which I began-ideas of the outward senses, ideas we conceive in our mind, and ideas we remember. We must recollect that when ideas of the senses are little heeded, and the conceptions of the mind acquire the force of realities, then we are said to be absent, or to be in a revery, or we are under the influence of great passions, or asleep, or somnambulists, or madmen. There is less difference between ideas of sense and conceptions in our infancy than in our mature age, when the difference is widened by experience; and this difference again becomes less, when the effects of experience are lost in extreme old age. We conceive some objects of sense better than others.

Men differ in their power of lively conception, but more in their habits of attention; but conception is in all men much strengthened by habit. Lastly, ideas of memory fade away, and appear in a renovated shape, as the mere creatures of the brain. These are the faint and imperfect notices of the great operations which are passing within us: the practical inference from them is, while we give vigor, extent, and variety to our conceptions, by cultivating an ardent curiosity for knowledge, to repress their dangerous vivacity by a cool and steady appeal to the realities of life; to cherish this reproductive faculty, as the source of eloquence, poetry, and wit; but so to cherish it that we will govern it, and even exact from it a ready obedience to the natural majesty of truth. He who can thus manage his mind has two worlds before him instead of one: he can contemplate and act; and, dispelling the vision of a rich and creative mind, can come down into the world of realities to observe with steadfastness, and to act with consistency.

FRAGMENT OF LECTURE VI.

ON MEMORY.

He obtains all the convenience which he does obtain by the reference of individual transactions to certain general heads; and thus, by knowing only the nature of any transaction he wishes to refer to, and by seeking for it under its appropriate division, it is found with facility and dispatch.

Mr. Stewart conceives (and, as it appears to me, with great justice) that the decay of memory observable in old men, proceeds as frequently from the very little interest they take in what is passing around them, as in any bodily decay by which their powers of mind are weakened:-" In so far as this decay of memory which old age brings along with it, is a necessary consequence of a physical change in the constitution, or a necessary consequence of a diminution of sensibility, it is the part of a wise man to submit cheerfully to the lot of his nature. But it is not unreasonable to think, that something may be done by our own efforts, to obviate the inconveniences which commonly result from it.

'If individuals who, in the early part of life, have weak memories, are sometimes able to remedy this defect by a greater attention to arrangement in their transactions, and to classification among their ideas, than is necessary to the bulk of mankind, might it not be possible, in the same way, to ward off, at least to a certain degree, the encroachments which time makes on this faculty? The few old men who continue in the active scenes of life to the last moment, it has often been remarked, complain, in general, much less of a want of