§ 13. The Faculty of Cognition in the State of Decentralization

§ 13. The Faculty of Cognition in the State of Decentralization.

The power of cognition, in its waking constitution, expresses itself receptively, that is, as intuitive seeing-into, and spontaneously, that is, as self-empowered and creative thought, whereby it makes the deeper constitution of things accessible and comprehensible to itself, and likewise itself generates the lawful form and order of higher cognition. But the possibility of spontaneous thinking, that is, of cognition realizing itself spontaneously through understanding and reason, rests upon the spontaneous life of selfhood in general. If, then, the spontaneous life of the ego ceases in sleep, the energy of thought in general sinks along with it; reason and understanding, as the chief powers of profundity and acute discrimination, cease to act, and, with them, movement within the concept, the systematic periodic construction of thought, and logical clarity, development, and consistency. There thus remains for the dream-sphere only the cognitive life of receptivity, insofar as it takes the impressions of its own exertion essentially from the narrow periphery of the dream-sphere; within these bounds in general, however, only the lower faculty of cognition is active, since the generative powers of concept and idea supply it with no nourishment. Whatever, then, resembling reflective thought-activity, or akin to such phenomena, nonetheless shows itself in dream-life must prove to be either something not originally issuing from and engendered by dream-life itself, or something genuinely generated within the dream-sphere, yet not called forth by the power of reflection.

As for the linking-together of images into forms of thought that occurs in sleep, out of which the genus of the template-dreams is formed, we have already said above that the nonsensical content of these dreams runs entirely counter to the law of real thinking, and hence falls outside the domain of genuine reflection altogether; but insofar as the mere form of this linkage cannot be denied to belong to real thought, it nonetheless does not belong to any actual activity of the understanding during the dream, but is rather the dying-away echo of waking understanding-activity, insofar as this continues to propagate itself further through the images themselves, forming the last extinguishing of the daytime understanding. Likewise, the well-known and interesting phenomenon that, if one resolved the evening before to wake at a determined hour early the next morning, this actually comes to pass in the midst of sleep, does not, in its generative cause, belong to sleep and dream, nor therefore to any spontaneity of the ego in the dream, but to the waking thought and will of the evening before, especially since the will had itself set the determined time at which waking was to occur; this phenomenon therefore rests upon the vigorous after- and continued vibration of the waking thinking will, carried through sleep and dream. Upon the same ground rest the reflective observations which the dream-researcher is able to make, suddenly and immediately, in the very midst of sleep, when some dream-formation of interest to him develops. If, in order to learn the life of the dream at its very source, one had to resolve, while waking, to attend to it in sleep, then it is precisely the resolution formed by day, and not the energy of the dream-ego, that carries out the intention without any voluntary deliberation or decision, and the waking life of the spirit simply transfers itself, as a parasitic growth, over into that of the dream. Half belonging to waking, half to sleep-life, is the genus of the thought-dreams, whose immediately discovered results so often carry one away to admiration. If one had, the day before, and especially on the evening before falling asleep, applied oneself to strenuous reflection of some kind, without succeeding in coming to a conclusion, the dream often takes hold of the thinking that continues to resound from waking into sleep-life, and carries it through. The whole object of the thinking, with its representational content and its living tendency to bring itself to a close, is set in motion and kept in agitation by waking; to this is added the creative activity of imagination, which takes the inherited content of thought as its object, grasps it plastically, that is, in total expression and coherence, and forms out of it a complete form of reflection. Independent or voluntary movement of understanding and reason as powers of thought does not occur here at all, hence no reflecting or calculating either; rather, the problem resolves itself after the manner of imagination, immediately, and in a manner opposed to the ways of reflection, wherefore, here too, there can be no talk of a spontaneous life of thought.