If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if the
context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars from
the real death's context, and if my dream led me to no action about the
death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence,
and naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long context,
agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real
death; if I were constantly having such dreams, all equally perfect, and
if on awaking I had a habit of ACTING immediately as if they were true
and so getting 'the start' of my more tardily instructed neighbors,--we
should in all probability have to admit that I had some mysterious kind
of clairvoyant power, that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just
those realities they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failed
to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any one preserved
would completely vanish, if it should appear that from the midst of my
dream I had the power of INTERFERING with the course of the reality, and
making the events in it turn this way or that, according as I dreamed
they should. Then at least it would be certain that my waking critics
and my dreaming self were dealing with the SAME.
And thus do men invariably decide such a question. THE FALLING OF THE
DREAM'S PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES into the real world, and the EXTENT
of the resemblance between the two worlds are the criteria they
instinctively use. [Footnote: The thoroughgoing objector might, it is
true, still return to the charge, and, granting a dream which should
completely mirror the real universe, and all the actions dreamed in
which should be instantly matched by duplicate actions in this universe,
still insist that this is nothing more than harmony, and that it is as
far as ever from being made clear whether the dream-world refers to that
other world, all of whose details it so closely copies. This objection
leads deep into metaphysics. I do not impugn its importance, and justice
obliges me to say that but for the teachings of my colleague, Dr. Josiah
Royce, I should neither have grasped its full force nor made my own
practical and psychological point of view as clear to myself as it is.
On this occasion I prefer to stick steadfastly to that point of view;
but I hope that Dr. Royce's more fundamental criticism of the function
of cognition may ere long see the light. [I referred in this note to
Royce's religious aspect of philosophy, then about to be published. This
powerful book maintained that the notion of REFERRING involved that of
an inclusive mind that shall own both the real q and the mental q, and
use the latter expressly as a representative symbol of the former.
At the time I could not refute this transcendentalist opinion. Later,
largely through the influence of Professor D. S. Miller (see his essay
'The meaning of truth and error,' in the Philosophical Review for 1893,
vol. 2 p.
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