Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
Milton.
We must not forget that it is easy to miss the good results of any natural function, and, through , get only poor results. As in the matter of eating, we should get only good from satisfying our hunger, but the acquired habit of eating more than we need or can digest does incalculable harm. In the same way we may misuse sleep, and so lose its best benefits.
 
“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” may be made, as Shakespeare says, a repairing time as well as a resting time, for as Iamblichus, the Neo-Platonic philosopher saw, “The night-time of the body is the daytime of the soul.” With some insight into the best uses of this natural habit, Iamblichus further said that, during sleep, “the nobler part of the soul is united by abstraction to higher natures and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods.” Dr. Thomas J. Hudson’s claim made a very popular appeal, that there is a mind made up of our inner knowledge, our own intuitions and mental processes. He it to be a part of our being that is able, in some instances—as in the case of “lightning calculators,” of mind-readers and of some clairvoyants—to perceive the relations of things without reasoning them out, and to perceive the laws of Nature without the aid of the senses.[3] He concluded that this mind or this of mind is an inheritance from experiences and conclusions of the race in its upward growth.
 
Swedenborg also, who was at least a scientist, divided the mind into the Interior, corresponding to the subjective mind, and the or reasoning memory.[4]
 
The objective mind, as it may be called, is what we all know as mind or intellect, that part which deals with external objects, getting its impressions and reaching its conclusions from observation. It is differently in different individuals by such physical things as sight and hearing. For a proof of this, ask any two persons who have seen and heard and been affected by something you have seen and felt, to describe its effect upon them, and the mental picture they have of it. Not only will they not agree in detail with each other, but you will find that neither has seen it in the same way that you have.
 
Modern science cannot accept the statement that foreign, mysterious agencies control the mind during sleep; but may not some such experience as that which Iamblichus describes, come to us in sleep by the spirit working, not from without, but from within us? Our spiritual nature is freed at night from the calls that us during the day. In the calm that comes over it in the night-time the doors of the storehouses of memory may stand wide open before it, and it may lead perhaps a broader, fuller life.
 
Professor William James has shown that in our waking hours, each of us is not so much a single self as a cluster of separate selves—a business self, social self, the material self, and so on—all making up the man as his casual acquaintances know him. Professor James found that in every individual there is and sometimes among these partial selves. Now may it not be that in the silence, these warring lose their identity in a state of broader conscious life, and themselves into a “Spiritual Me”?
 
From the standpoint of this spiritual self, then, the waking state shows only the objective aspects of the mind. It is that understanding which shows us all men working, whether willingly or , for the common good, and each receiving what he needs or has power to use. It is a recognition that all men are comprehended in the ............