A narrower field for these general associative dispositions may be found in the tendency, on the reception of an impression of a given character, to look for a certain kind of second impression; though the exact nature of this is unknown. Thus, for example, the form and colour of a new flower suggest a scent, and the perception of a human form is accompanied by a vague representation of vocal utterances. These general tendencies of association appear to me to be most potent influences in our dream-life. The many strange human forms which float before our dream-fancy are apt to talk, move, and behave like men and women in general, however little they resemble their actual prototypes, and however little individual consistency of character is preserved by each of them. Special conditions determine what they shall say or do; the general associative disposition accounts for their saying or doing something. We thus seem to find in the purely passive processes of association some ground for that degree of natural coherence and rational order which our more mature dreams commonly possess. These processes go far to explain, too, that odd mixture of rationality with improbability, of natural order and incongruity, which characterizes our dream-combinations. _Rational Construction in Dreams._ Nevertheless, I quite agree with Herr Volkelt that association, even in the most extended meaning, cannot explain all in the shaping of our dream-pictures. The "phantastical power" which Cudworth talks about clearly includes something besides. It is an erroneous supposition that when we are dreaming there is a complete suspension of the voluntary powers, and consequently an absence of all direction of the intellectual processes. This supposition, which has been maintained by numerous writers, from Dugald Stewart downwards, seems to be based on the fact that we frequently find ourselves in dreams striving in vain to move the whole body or a limb. But this only shows, as M. Maury remarks in the work already referred to, that our volitions are frustrated through the inertia of our bodily organs, not that these volitions do not take place. In point of fact, the dreamer, not to speak of the somnambulist, is often conscious of voluntarily going through a series of actions. This exercise of volition is shown unmistakably in the well-known instances of extraordinary intellectual achievements in dreams, as Condillac's composition of a part of his _Cours d'Etudes_. No one would maintain that a result of this kind was possible in the total absence of intellectual action carefully directed by the will. And something of this same control shows itself in all our more fully developed dreams.