unconnected, are commonly the effect of some confusion in his machine;
such as painful indigestion--an overheated blood--a prejudicial
fermentation, &c.--these material causes excite in his body a disorderly
motion, which precludes the brain from being modified in the same manner
it was on the day before; in consequence of this irregular motion the
brain is disturbed, it only represents to itself confused ideas that
want connection. When in a dream, he believes he sees a Sphinx, a being
supposed by the poets to have a head and face like a woman, a body like
a dog, wings like a bird, and claws like a lion, who put forth riddles
and killed those who could not expound them; either, he has seen the
representation of one when he was awake, or else the disorderly motion
of the brain is such that it causes it to combine ideas, to connect
parts, from which there results a whole without model, of which the
parts were not formed to be united. It is thus, that his brain combines
the head of a woman, of which it already has the idea, with the body of
a lioness, of which it also has the image. In this his head acts in the
same manner, as when by any defect in the interior organ, his disordered
imagination paints to him some objects, notwithstanding he is awake. He
frequently dreams, without being asleep: his dreams never produce any
thing so strange but that they have some resemblance, with the objects
which have anteriorly acted on his senses; which have already
communicated ideas to his brain. The watchful theologians have composed,
at their leisure, in their waking hours, those phantoms, of which they
avail themselves, to terrify or frighten man; they have done nothing
more than assemble the scattered traits which they have found in the
most terrible beings of their own species; by exaggerating the powers,
by enlarging the rights claimed by tyrants, they have formed ideal
beings, before whom man trembles, and is afraid.

Thus, it is seen, that dreams, far from proving that the soul acts by