"How! are you dead?"
"Yes, very often. I suffered from epilepsy in my youth, and I assure you
that I was completely dead for several hours. No sensation, no
remembrance even of the moment that I fell ill. The same thing happens
to me now nearly every night. I never feel the precise moment that I go
to sleep; my sleep is absolutely dreamless. I cannot imagine by
conjecture how long I have slept. I am dead regularly six hours out of
the twenty-four. That is a quarter of my life."
The orthodox then asserted that he always thought during his sleep
without knowing anything about it. The heterodox answered him--"I
believe through revelation that I shall always think in the other life;
but I assure you I think rarely in this one."
The orthodox was not mistaken in asserting the immortality of the soul,
for faith and reason demonstrate this truth; but he might be mistaken in
asserting that a sleeping man always thinks.
Locke admitted frankly that he did not always think while he was asleep:
another philosopher has said--"Thought is characteristic of man; but it
is not his essence."
Let us leave to each man the liberty and consolation of seeking himself,
and of losing himself in his ideas.
It is good, however, to know, that in 1730 a philosopher[21] suffered a
severe enough persecution for having confessed, with Locke, that his
understanding was not exercised at every moment of the day and night,
just as he did not use his arms and his legs at all moments.
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