absurd to imagine--I
must have come here. If I was here while I was asleep in my cubicle,
does not that constitute a complete severance of my body and my inner
being? Does it not prove some inscrutable locomotive faculty in the
spirit with effects resembling those of locomotion in the body? Well,
then, if my spirit and my body can be severed during sleep, why should
I not insist on their separating in the same way while I am awake? I see
no half-way mean between the two propositions.

"But if we go further into details: either the facts are due to the
action of a faculty which brings out a second being to whom my body is
merely a husk, since I was in my cell, and yet I saw the landscape--and
this upsets many systems; or the facts took place either in some nerve
centre, of which the name is yet to be discovered, where our feelings
dwell and move; or else in the cerebral centre, where ideas are formed.
This last hypothesis gives rise to some strange questions. I walked, I
saw, I heard. Motion is inconceivable but in space, sound acts only at
certain angles or on surfaces, color is caused only by light. If, in the
dark, with my eyes shut, I saw, in myself, colored objects; if I heard
sounds in the most perfect silence and without the conditions requisite
for the production of sound; if without stirring I traversed wide tracts
of space, there must be inner faculties independent of the external laws
of physics. Material nature must be penetrable by the spirit.

"How is it that men have hitherto given so little thought to the
phenomena of sleep, which seem to prove that man has a double life? May
there not be a new science lying beneath them?" he added, striking his
brow with his hand. "If not the elements of a science, at any rate the
revelation of stupendous powers in man; at least they prove a frequent
severance of our two natures, the fact I have been thinking out for
a very long time. At last, then, I have hit on evidence to show the
superiority that distinguishes our latent senses from our corporeal
senses! _Homo duplex_!

"And yet," he went on, after a pause, with a doubtful shrug, "perhaps
we have not two natures; perhaps we are merely gifted with personal
and perfectible qualities, of which the development within us produces
certain unobserved phenomena of activity, penetration, and vision. In
our love of the marvelous, a passion begotten of our pride, we have
translated these effects into poetical inventions, bec