that even when the intellectual energy of Greece
was signalizing itself by efforts which have commanded the admiration of
after ages, it should still remain a popular dogma in medicine "that
persons labouring under bodily infirmity, might be thrown into a state
of charmed torpor, in which, though destitute of any previous medical
knowledge, they would be enabled to ascertain the nature of their
malady, as well as of the diseases of others, and devise the means of
their cure." Upon this dogma was founded the mystery of incubations, or
the art of healing by visionary divination.

It is not our object here to discuss whether a man can be capable of
divination: such a power, however, was assigned to him, not only by the
vulgar, but by the greater number of the philosophical sects of
antiquity; and it does appear to savour a little of temerity, that
Epicurus and the cynics should have ventured to reject a belief so
universally and strenuously maintained, and resting on an infinity of
traditions and accounts of prophets, in whom Greece had abounded from
her earliest times, and of whose divine gift of prophecy the firmest
conviction was currently entertained. Aeschylus, Plutarch, Apuleius, and
other Greek authors, bear ample testimony of this persuasion, and tell
us that by uncommon and irregular motions of the body intoxicating
vapours, or certain holy ejaculations, men might be thrown into an
enchanted trance; in which, being in a state between sleeping and
waking, they were unsusceptible of external impressions and obtaining a
glimpse of futurity, were gifted with the power of prophecy. Here their
allusion, however, only concerns the celebrated divinations of the
Pythia.[89] We must therefore, probe somewhat deeper, in order to
illustrate that species of divination which was the result of dreams,
and a source of divination on the nature of diseases and their remedies.

This kind of superstition was in no less acceptation than the former
among the ancients, whose temples were constantly crowded with the sick,
and reverberated with their supplications for divinatory dreams, which
were regarded as an immediate gift from the gods. Indeed, the celestial
origin of dreams was universally admitted by the nations of antiquity,
and thence also their efficacy as oracles. Nothing could be more natural
than such an idea. From the crude and imperfect notions which long
prevailed with respect to the soul, it was scarcely possible for them