Perceiving that the natural intelligence is in abeyance during sleep, he conceives that the communication is made to the lower, the sensual, soul - as we may perhaps say, directly to the senses. He perceives the likeness in the conditions of sleep, trance and ecstasy, in all which alike the operations of the mind are some what in abeyance, and conceives that only under those conditions are the divine communications made. It is a view of divine inspiration which has held its ground all down the ages. But for the correct understanding of the communications, when made, he conceives that the rational intelligence is required, and clearly intimates that this correct understanding in more likely to be reached by others than by those who have received the communications - by an expert class of interpreters in fact - apparently with the idea that the highest critical faculty is not likely to co - exist with the faculty of receiving the communications. To put it in popular modern phrase, the dreamy person is not likely to be correctly critical - a conclusion in which we shall be able to agree.

It is almost as much as to say that the creative and critical faculties are seldom given to one person in the highest perfection.

Aristotle, whose mind is as typical of the critical disposition as Plato's of the creative, takes the view of the subject that we should perhaps expect to find in a philosopher of his time and temper. He treats the popular theory with a kind of conscious indulgence, in an essay on divination in dreams, saying that it is "not incredible" that the gods may communicate with man in sleep. The Stoic philosophers, as a rule, considered it only natural to suppose that they would do so.

A like opinion was held in the Rome of the republic and the empire. Cicero, for all his saying that he could not understand how augurs - those who prophesied from the flight of birds and the like significant phenomena - could pass one another in the street without a grin, had some disposition to think that divine communication in dreams was not impossible, and his views on the whole question work out to much the same conclusion as that of Aristotle. Yet all these writers, later than the date of the direct intimation recorded in the Homeric poems, discuss the intimations given in dreams as belonging to the second class of Seafield's biblical dreams, the communications given in an allegory, as by the sheaves of Joseph, the geese of Penelope, The Deity was not made manifest, either personally or by the appearance of the messenger. The intimation was given in form of a parable, so to speak, and it required the service of an expert to interpret its meaning accurately.

These people, the Stoics and the rest of them, did not know in their philosophy the person whom the compassionate Scotch divine spoke of as "the puir de'il"; and this is probably the reason that we do not find them much perturbed with the notion that a dream might be sent purposely to delude. The question of the source of the dream does not seem to have troubled their interpreters, much as its secret meaning might worry their skill in deciphering. But when we come to the Christian Fathers, as they are called, with whom the devil was a very real and important personage indeed, then we seem to come back again to the old story. They held it as a truth beyond question that the Divine will and Divine knowledge often were communicated to man in dreams, but at the same time deemed that dreams were often sent by the evil one for his own evil purposes. Of the Stoical philosophers, there was at least one, Ennius, who thought the whole business of soothsaying and dream interpreting what a modern schoolboy would call "all rot". He considered, in the words of Seafield, that they all, "augurs, astrologers, dreamers and interpreters of dreams" were to be "despised as vain pretenders to more than human skill". This is an extremely modern view of the affair.

But though Ennius, in this bravely impious opinion, thus stands apart from all his brethren of the old philosophies, we do not find a single one of the patristic Christians so greatly daring. It is not possible or profitable to quote many of them. St Thomas Aquinas is distinctly of the opinion that God communicates His will to men in their dreams, and mentions Joseph and Daniel as among those who have been skilled in the business of interpreting the Divine meaning thus obscurely revealed. He has no doubt that dreams give glimpses into futurity; but he is much troubled by the difficulty that crops up on the very threshold, as to knowing whether the dreams are sent from heaven or its antipodes. He points out the sufficiently obvious difficulty, but does not suggest any very efficacious way of solving it. Calvin, too, conceives that God may still, as he undoubtedly did in many instances recorded in Holy Writ, communicate with men in their dreams, and further preaches the duty of praying for good and helpful dreams and for deliverance from those that are evil.

The question that this touches, of man's moral responsibility for the nature of his dreams, is one that terribly vexed the casuists of the Middle Ages and the Reformation. Dreams scarcely fall within the province of ethics in their modern conception. We dream of committing the most fearful crimes, yet do not think ourselves in any degree guilty. The old divines did not take this lenient view of the matter at all. Actually they show disposition to revert to the old primitive idea of the reality of the dream apparitions; for these evil apparitions they professed to regard, in some instances, not merely as being inspired, sent or suggested by evil demons, but actually as being evil demons, who only appeared when the soul was freed, as in sleep, from its terrestrial trappings. Many learned pages are devoted to consideration of the best means of exorcising, whether by prayer or other less simple methods, these evil apparitions, for whose appearance the dreamer was deemed none the less responsible, or but little less responsible, because of the supposed reality of their existence. A little less responsible, perhaps, is the way to phrase it, for there is a curious blend in the manner in which some of the old writers regarded the case.