dream is composed, a conversation may be maintained, and the bye-stander by dexterous management, and the assumption of a character which he finds introduced into the dream, be able to draw from the dreamer the profoundest secrets of his bosom: the other senses of the latter, instead of rousing hereby to detect the imposition, being plunged into a still deeper lethargy, from the demand of an increased quantity of sensorial power to spport the exhaustion which the wakeful or active organ is in consequence sustaining. VII. If the wakeful nerves be the optical alone, the somnambulist or dreamer, who is accustomed to walk in his sleep, will be able to make his way towards any place to which the course of his dream directs him with the most perfect ease, and without the smallest degree of danger; he will see as clearly, and perhaps more so, as if generally awake; yet, from the very exhaustion, and, of course, increased torpidity of the organs, in consequence of an increased demand of sensorial power from the common stock to support the action of the sense and muscles immediately engaged, every other sense must necessarily be thrown into a deeper sleep or torpidity than on any other occasion. Hence the ears will not be roused even by a sound that might otherwise awake him; he will be insensible, not only to a simple touch, but a severe shaking of his limbs, and may even cough violently without being recalled from his dream. Having accomplished the object of his pursuit, he may safely return, even over the most dangerous precipices, for he sees them distinctly, to his bed; and the optical nerves themselves being now quite exhausted, and the system at large incapable of affording any addition of sensorial power, the torpidity must necessarily be rendered general and profound; so profound, perhaps, as to destroy the habitual action of the nervous tubules of the brain itself, and produce sleep without thought or dreaming. VIII. This phenomenon of somnambulism has never, that I know of, to the present day, been satisfactorily or even plausibly accounted for. It follows necessarily, in conjunction with that of speaking and conversing in sleep, from the theory of which I have now, for the first time, presented the outlines: and, I trust, will appear plain and intelligible to the reader.' SLEEP (Somnus), with the ancient poets, was the son of Erebus and of Night, according to Homer and Hesiod, and the brother of Mors or Death. Virgil (Æn. vi. v. 278) assigns to this deity an abode with Death, in the subterraneous or invisible world. Statius and Ovid place his chief residence, or great palace of Somnus, on our earth, in the country of the Cimmerians; no country agreeing better with sleep than that which is overspread with eternal darkness. Theb. x. v. 84 to 117. Met. xi. v. 592 to 645. Dreams were the children of sleep; Ovid names three of them, viz. Morpheus, Phobetor, and Phantasia. By artists this deity is commonly represented as a soft youth, stretched at his ease on a couch, resting his head on a lion's skin, and sometimes on a lion; with one arm either a little over or under his head, and the other dropping negli gently by the side of the couch, and either holding poppies, or a horn with the juice of poppies in it. He is often winged, and much resembles a little Cupid, from whom he is distinguished by the lizard (an animal supposed to sleep half the year) placed at his feet. There is scarcely any one of the deities that is more fully and particularly described by the poets than this deity of sleep.-Spence's Polymetis. SLEEP, in the new System of Medicine. See PHYSIOLOGY. SLEEP, in the mythology. See MORPHEUS and SOMNUS. SLEEP OF PLANTS, somnus plantarum, is a term used by Linnæus, to express a peculiar state in the constitution of many plants during the night, evinced by a change of position, a drooping, or a folding together, of their leaves or leaflets. Such a change, being occasioned by the withdrawing of the stimulus of light, is probably a state of rest to their vital functions, and therefore the above term is not so hyperbolical as at first appears. Linnæus has given a curious treatise on this subject, in the Amænitates Academicæ, v. 4, 333. The phenomenon had been noticed long before, by Acosta and Prosper Alpinus in the tamarind tree; and the latter points out several parallel instances in other leguminous plants with pinnated leaves, natives of Egypt. It is indeed most remarkable in such plants. But Linnæus has elaborately described the various positions which the leaves of different plants assume in their sleep. In general, it may be remarked that they cover or fold together the upper surfaces of their leaves, exposing the under, which latter is almost uniformly impatient of light. This is so much the case, that we cannot but suspect the effect of the returning light upon the backs of such leaves, may be the immediate cause of their withdrawing from it, and thus the upper surface becomes necessarily presented to its rays. A similar effect of light is seen in many flowers, particularly of the compound tribe. See BOTANY, PHYSIOLOGY, and SENSITIVE. SLEEP OF THE SOUL, in theology, denotes a supposed insensible, and inactive state, into which some have thought that mankind are removed at death, and in which they remain till the period of their resurrection: the term has been used by way of contradistinction to that which has been commonly called the intermediate or separate state. Of the advocates of this opinion, some have allowed the essential distinction between body and spirit, and the natural iminortality of the human soul; so that, being a substance and not a mode, it will go on to exist, till by some positive act of the Creator it is annihilated. They cannot admit the supposition that the whole man becomes extinct at death, or that death destroys or annihilates the thinking substance; because they say, the resurrection on this hypothesis will not be a resurrection, but a creation of a new set of beings: if death annihilates us in this sense, there can be no future state; because a being who has lost his existence cannot be recovered. Accordingly, they maintain that what happens to the soul at death can be no more than a suspension of the exercise of its faculties, or an incapacitation, from which it will by the power of Christ be delivered at the resurrection: and they allege, that there is an infinite difference between the annihilation of the soul at death, and its incapacitation; because, one who believes the former could not possibly entertain the hope of a future state; but one who believes the latter might reasonably entertain such a hope. Death, they say, is a distress in which our species has been involved by extraordinary causes, and from which we have obtained the hope of being saved by the most extraordinary means, viz. by the interposition of Jesus Christ, who, taking upon him our nature, and humbling himself to death, has acquired the power of destroying death, and is on this account styled the Saviour of the world. However, most of those who deny the notion of an intermediate state of conscious perception between death and the general resurrection, reject the supposition of two distinct natures in man, and consider that principle, which is called the soul, not as a spiritual substance, but as a quality, or property, either su peradded to matter by the Creator of our frame, or resulting from the organisation of the human body, and particularly of the brain. They accordingly allege that when the organised system to which the power of thinking, &c., is annexed, on which it depends, and from the organisation of which, as some maintain, it necessarily results, is dissolved by death; all the percipient and thinking powers of man, all his capacities of action, and of suffering, or of enjoyment, must be extinguished, and cease of course. And if the property of thinking necessarily attends the property of life, as some apprehend, nothing can be requisite to the restoration of all the powers of the man, but the restoration of the body (no particle of which can be lost) to a state of life. Whatever is decomposed, it is said, may certainly be recomposed by the same Almighty power that first composed it, with whatever change in its constitution, advantageous or disadvantageous, he shall think proper; and then the powers of thinking, and whatever depended upon them, will return of course, and the man will be, in the most proper sense, the same being that he was before. Those who hold this opinion maintain that, according to the Scriptures, life and immortality were brought to light by the gospel of Christ, in a sense exclusive of all other teachers, and all other revelations, at least from the birth of Moses downwards; exclusive, likewise, of all information from the light of nature, or the result of philosophical disquisition on the substance or qualities of the human soul. They hold, moreover, that the sentence pronounced upon our first parents imported a total deprivation of life, without any reserve, or saving to the life of the soul; and, consequently, that eternal life, or a restoration and redemption from the consequences of this sentence, was effected for, revealed, consigned, and insured to man, in and through Christ, and will be accomplished in no other way than that spoken of by Christ and his apostles, who, they say, have left no room to conclude that there is a separate or inter mediate life for the soul, when disunited from the body. The late learned Dr. Law, bishop of Carlisle, having, with a particular view to the controversy concerning the intermediate state, enumerated the several passages both in the Old and New Testament, in which the words that are translated soul or spirit in our version occur, maintains that none of them ever stand for a purely immaterial principle in man, or a substance wholly separable from, and independent of, the body; and, after examining the account which the Scriptures give of that state to which death reduces us, he observes that it is represented by sleep, by a negation of all life, thought, or action; by rest, resting-place, or home, silence, oblivion, darkness, destruction, or corruption. He adds that the Scripture, in speaking of the connexion between our present and future being, doth not take into account our intermediate state in death; no more than we, in describing the course of any man's actions, take in the time he sleeps: and that, therefore, the Scriptures, in order to be consistent with themselves, must affirm an immediate connexion between death and judgment. As for those texts that are usually alleged on the other side of the question, which he has cited and endeavoured to accommodate to his own opinion, he thinks that they are quite foreign to the point, or purely figurative, or capable of a clear and easy solution on the principle which he adopts, viz. that the times of our death and resurrection are coincident; and that they cannot be fairly opposed to the constant obvious tenor of the sacred writings. With respect to philosophical arguments, deduced from our notions of matter, and urged against the possibility of life, thought, and agency, being so connected with some portions of it as to constitute a compound being or person, he imagines that they are merely grounded on our ignorance, and that they will equally prove against known fact and observation, in the production of various animals, as against the union of two such heterogeneous principles as those of the soul and body are supposed to be. With respect to the consequences of either opinion, he says, that on the one side, there is nothing more than a temporary cessation of thought, which can hurt nobody, except the selfinterested papist, or the self-sufficient deist; but, on the other side, there is a manifest derogation from, if not a total subversion of, that positive covenant, which professes to entitle us to everlasting life. He adds that all proper and consistent notions of death, resurrection, and a future judgment, are confounded, and, in fine, all the great sanctions of the gospel rendered unintelligible or useless. Another advocate of this soul-sieeping system contends that man shall become immortal, by the way of a resurrection of the dead, or a restoration of the whole man to life; and that the New Testament is so far from acknowledging any intermediate consciousness in man, between death and the resurrection, that it always speaks of that interval as a sleep, which implies a suspension of the thinking faculty, a rest from those labors which require thought, memory, consciousness, &c., during which those faculties are useless. Besides, the scriptural system of immortality supposes that man had forfeited his original title to immortality, and would never have received it, but for the interposition of a Redeemer. The consequence of this doctrine is, that, between the time of the forfeiture and the actual appearance of the Redeemer, the dead could have life in no sense at all; and that neither be fore nor after the appearance of the Redeemer, dead men were, or would be restored to life, otherwise than in the way revealed by him, namely, a resurrection of the dead. On the other hand, the advocates of a separate state insist that the soul being an active, simple, uncompounded, immaterial substance, is immortal in its own nature, and capable of an active and conscious existence, in a state of disunion and separation from the body; that this natural capacity of the soul was not impaired, or at all affected by any thing that happened upon the transgression of our first parents; that the death, to which they were condemned was only the death of the body: hence they infer that there is, and would have been, a future immortal state of being beyond the present life, and (the moral attributes of God presupposed) a just retribution therein, independent of the doctrine of a resurrection of the dead; and that, in the interval between death and the general resurrection, there is an intermediate state, in which the departed souls of good men are supposed to have an imperfect reward, and the souls of the wicked an imperfect punishment; but that every one, at the period of the reunion of the soul and body, and of final judgment, will receive a full and complete recompense for the deeds done in the body. In proof of this opinion they allege a variety of passages both from the Old and New Testament, the principal of which we shall here enumerate; Gen. ii. 7, xv. 15, xxxvii. 35; Exod. iii. 6; 1 Sam. xxviii. 11-19; 1 Kings, xvii. 21, 22; Ps. xxxi. 5; Eccles. iii. 21, xii. 7; Matt. x. 28. xvii. 3; Luke xvi. 19, xx. 38, xxiii. 43, xxiv. 39; Acts i. 25, vii. 59; 2 Cor. v. 8, xii. 2; Phil. i 21—24; 1 Pet. iii. 19, iv. 6; Heb. xi. 40, xii. 23; Rev. vi. 9, 10, xiv. 13. The fathers who lived in or near the time of the apostles are said to be unanimous in this opinion, and persuaded that the soul of every man upon the dissolution of the body died not, but had a proper place to go to, and accordingly this doctrine is to be found in the most ancient Christian liturgies. The bishop of Carlisle observes that the word death, in its original and obvious sense, implies a cessation of all natural life, or a real dissolution and destruction of the whole man. Mr. Farmer also, a well-known writer, in the introduction to his General Prevalence of the Worship of Human Spirits, &c., 1783, has taken some pains to ascertain the meaning of the word death, in the threatening denounced against Adam. He says, that if human spirits were worshipped in the age of Moses, particularly in Egypt and Phoenicia, the word death could not at that time, and in those countries, denote more than the destruction of bodily life; for, if this term had farther included in it the insensibility or extinction of the soul; the dead would not have been honored as gods. And if Moses had used it in this extensive sense, he would have been misunderstood by the Egyptians, who asserted the immortality of the soul, and by the Hebrews, who dwelt among them, and had adopted their system of religion. This writer, in confirmation of his interpretation of death, observes that although one great design of Moses, in giving an account of the introduction of death into the world, was to guard against the worship of departed spirits, and though nothing could have answered this design more effectually than representing the soul of Adam as a mere quality, or as the result of the peculiar structure and organisation of his body, yet, so far is he from supposing this to be the case, that, according to him, after the body of the first man was perfectly organised by the immediate hand of the Almighty, he did not become a living soul or person, till God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; a principle distinct from the dust out of which his body was formed, and, therefore, capable of subsisting in a state of separation from it. Nor does Moses use the same language in relating the formation of any other living creatures; which proves that the principle of life in man is of a superior kind to that in brutes. Besides, the ancient patri. archs did not believe that the soul of man perished with his body. Agreeably to the most ancient opinion concerning departed spirits, the sacred writers supposed the souls of the dead to exist in sheol, or hades, a place invisible to human sight, and that, in the distribution of them, regard was had to the former relation in which they stood to one another. Moreover, Moses himself believed the separate subsistence of the soul, and has even given it a divine sanction. Gen. xv. 15. Nor do any of the sacred writers ever describe death in terms different from those used by persons, who certainly acknowledged the continuance of the soul after it. Sleep, by which it is described, is not a state of non-existence, but of rest; and it is well known that this soft image of death was commonly used to express the thing itself, by those who asserted the existence of souls in hades. Silence, oblivion, darkness, and corruption, by which the state of the dead is described, refer only to the body, or to the supposed state of the soul, while it was in sheol, and are not peculiar to the sacred writers, but were common in all countries, where both the popular belief, and the established worship, were inconsistent with the notion of the soul's perishing with the body. And many of the terms, by which death was described in all countries, clearly imply, and are built upon, belief of the distinction between soul and body, and of their being separated at death. Campbell in his Preliminary Dissertations (Part ii.) has introduced some remarks that deserve the greatest attention, in this, controversy. He observes, I. That the arguments, on which the deniers of that state chiefly build, arise, in his opinion, from a misapprehension of the import of some scriptural expressions. Kaevde, Rouav, to sleep, are often applied to the dead; a but this application is no more than a metaphorical euphonism, derived from the resemblance which a dead body bears to the body of a person asleep. Traces of this idiom may be found in all languages, whatever be the popular belief about the state of the dead. They often occur in the Old Testament; yet it has been shown that the common doctrine of the Orientals favored the separate existence of the souls of the deceased. But if it did not, and if, as some suppose, the ancient Jews were, on all articles relating to another life, no better than Sadducees, this shows the more strongly that such metaphors, so frequent in their writings, could be derived solely from bodily likeness, and, having no reference to a resurrection, could be employed solely for the sake of avoiding a disagreeable or ominous word. It is acknowledged, at the same time, that Christians have been the more ready to adopt such expressions, as their doctrine of the resurrection of the body presented to their minds an additional analogy between the bodies of the deceased and the bodies of those asleep, that of being one day awaked. But our author sees no reason to imagine that, in this use, they carried their thoughts further than to the corporeal and visible resemblance now mentioned. Another mistake about the import of scriptural terms is in the sense which has been given to the word avasάous. They confine it, by a use derived merely from modern European tongues, to that renovation which we call the reunion of the soul and the body, and which is to take place at the last day. But this is not always the sense of the term in the New Testa ment. II. Dr. Campbell remarks that many expressions of Scripture, in the natural and obvious sense, imply that an intermediate and separate state of the soul is actually to succeed death. Such are the words of our Lord to the penitent thief upon the cross (Luke, xxiii. 43); Stephen's dying petition (Acts, vii. 59); the comparisons which the apostle Paul makes in different places (2 Cor. v. 6, &c.; Philip. i. 21) between the enjoyment which true Christians can obtain by their continuance in this world, and that on which they enter at their departure out of it, and several other passages. Let the words referred to be read by any judicious person, either in the original, or in the common translation, which is sufficiently exact for this purpose, and let him, setting aside all theory or system, say candidly whether they would not be understood, by the gross of mankind, as presupposing that the soul may and will exist separately from the body, and be susceptible of happiness or misery in that state. If any thing could add to the native evidence of the expressions, it would be the unnatural meaning that is put upon them, in order to disguise that evidence. The apostle Paul, they are sensible, speaks of the saints as admitted to enjoyment in the presence of God, immediately after death. Nevertheless, in order to palliate the direct contradiction this bears to their doctrine, that the vital principle, which is all they mean by the soul, remains extinguished between death and the resurrection, they remind us of the difference between absolute or real, and re lative or apparent, time. They admit that, if the apostle be understood as speaking of real time, what is said flatly contradicts their system; but they say his words must be interpreted as spoken only of apparent time. He talks indeed of entering on a state of enjoyment immediately after death, though there may be many thousands of years between the one and the other: for he means only, that when that state shall commence, however distant in reality the time may be, the person entering on it will not be sensible of that distance, and consequently there will be to him an apparent coincidence with the moment of his death. But, says Campbell, does the apostle any where give a hint that this is his meaning? or is it what any man would naturally discover from his words? Did the sacred penman, then, as our author proceeds, mean to put a cheat upon the world, and, by the help of an equivocal expression, to flatter men with the hope of entering, the instant they expire, on a state of felicity; when, in fact, they knew that it would be many ages before it would take place? But, were the hypothesis about the extinction of the mind between death and the resurrection well founded, the apparent coincidence they speak of is not so clear as they seem to think it. III. This able writer remarks that even the various equivocations (or, perhaps, more properly, mental reservation), that has been devised for them, will not, in every case, save the credit of apostolical veracity. The words of Paul to the Corinthians are, Knowing, that whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.' Again, 'We are willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord.' Could such expressions have been used by him, if he had held it impossible to be with the Lord, or indeed any where, without the body; and that, whatever the change was which was made by death, he could not be in the presence of the Lord, till he returned to the body? Absence from the body, and presence with the Lord, were never, therefore, more unfortunately combined. than in this illustration. Things are combined here as coincident, which, in the hypothesis of those gentlemen, are incompatible. If recourse be had to the original, the expressions in Greek are, if possible, still stronger. They are, evonpevtes ev tw owμari, those who dwell in the body, who are exồnμevтec aто т8 Kvρie, at a distance from the Lord; as, on the contrary, they are οι εκδημεντες εκ τα σώματος, those who have travelled out of the body, who are o venues as to Kyiv, those who reside, or are present with the Lord. In the passage to the Philippians, also, the commencement of his presence with the Lord is represented as coincident, not with his return to the body, but with his leaving it, with the dissolution, not with the restoration of the union. We may here subjoin an enquiry,, how the apostle could be in a strait betwixt two (Philip. i. 23), that of living in the flesh, and being with Christ, which he pronounces to be far better, if the exercise of his powers of service and capacity of enjoyment ceased at death. A mind like his could not hesitate between living in the flesh, and thus serving the Christian cause, and sinking at death into a state of total inaction, and of thus continuing for a long but indefinite period. IV. The fourth remark of Dr. Campbell on this subject is that, from the turn of the New Testament, the sacred writers appear to proceed on the supposition that the soul and the body are naturally distinct and separable, and that the soul is susceptible of pain or pleasure in a state of separation. It were endless to enumerate all the places which evince this. The story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke, xvi. 22, 23); the last words of our Lord upon the cross (Luke, xxiii. 46), and of Stephen when dying; Paul's doubts, whether he was in the body or out of the body, when he was translated to the third heaven and paradise (2 Cor. xii. 2, 3, 4); our Lord's words to Thomas, to satisfy him that he was not a spirit (Luke, xxiv. 39); and the express mention of the denial of spirits, as one of the errors of the Sadducees (Acts, xxiii. 8): these are irrefragable evidences of the general opinion on this subject, both of Jews and Christians. By spirit it is observed, as distinguished from angel, is evidently meant the departed spirit of a human being; for that man is here, before his natural death, possessed of a vital and intelligent principle, which is commonly called his soul or spirit, it was never pretended that they denied. It has been said that this manner of expressing themselves has been adopted by the apostles and evangelists, merely in conformity to vulgar notions. To me, says Dr. Campbell, it appears a conformity, which (if the sacred writers entertained the sentiments of our autagonists in this article) is hardly reconcileable to the known simplicity and integrity of their cha racter. SLEEPERS, in natural history, a name given to those animals which sleep all winter; such as bears, marmots, dormice, bats, hedgehogs, swallows, &c. These do not feed in winter, have no sensible evacuations, breathe little or none at all, and most of the viscera cease from their functions. Some of these creatures seem to be dead, and others return to a state like that of the fœtus before birth in this state they continue, till by new heat the fluids are attenuated, the animal is restored to life, and the functions begin where they left off. SLEEPERS, in a ship, timbers lying before and aft in the bottom of the ship, as the rungheads do: the lowermost of them is bolted to the rungheads, and the uppermost to the futtocks and rungs. SLEEPNER, in the Saxon mythology, the horse of Odin. See MYTHOLOGY. SLEEP-WALKER (from sleep and walker), one who walks in his sleep. See MEDICINE. Many instances might be related of persons who were addicted to this practice. A remarkable instance was published from a report made to the Physical Society of Lausanne, by a committee of gentlemen appointed to examine a young man who was accustomed to walk in his sleep. The disposition to sleep-walking seems, in the opinion of this committee, to depend on a particular affection of the nerves, which both seizes and quits the patient during sleep. Under the influence of this affection, the imagination repre sents to him the objects that struck him while awake, with as much force as if they really af fected his senses; but does not make him perceive any of those that are actually presented to his senses, except in so far as they are connected with the dreams which engross him at the time. If, during this state, the imagination has no determined purpose, he receives the impression of objects as if he were awake; only, however, when the imagination is excited to bend its attention towards them. The perceptions obtained in this state are very accurate, and, when once received, the imagination renews them occasionally with as much force as if they were again acquired by means of the senses. Lastly, these academicians suppose that the impressions received during this state of the senses disappear entirely when the person awakes, and do not return till the return of the same disposition in the nervous system. Their remarks were made on the Sieur Devand, a lad thirteen years and a half old, who lived in the town of Vevey, and who was subject to that singular affection or disease called somnambulism, or sleep-walking. The particulars, however, are not worth quoting; as many of the facts seem disputable, and some totally incredible; and the reasoning of the committee on those that are admissible is far from being conclusive. See SLEEP. SLEEP-WALKING, or SOMNAMBULISM. MEDICINE, Index. See SLEEPY TERTIAN. See MEDICINE, Index. SLEET, n. s. Dan. slud, slet; Swed. slagg. A kind of smooth small hail. Perpetual sleet and driving snow Dryden. Rains would have been poured down, as the vapours became cooler; next sleet, then snow and ice. Cheyne. SLEET. See SNOW. SLEEVE, n. s. Or SLEAVE, which see. SLEEVELESS, adj. Sax. rlip. The part of a garment that covers the arms: to hang on a sleeve' is, to make dependent: the adjective corresponding. Once my well-waiting eyes espied my treasure, With sleeves turned up, loose hair, and breast enHer father's corn moving her fair limbs, measure. larged, Sidney. |