Spiritual Influence of Sleep Illustrated

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

Thus far we have studied the function of sleep from it effects, and some of its uses. Now let us look a little further into the effect of its privation.

The sick in a high fever get little sleep. In time they are apt to become delirious. If they recover it is almost uniformly after an unusually prolonged and quiet sleep. In their fever and delirium their thought and speech are almost invariable of the world in which they live, its interests and concerns. Wise physicians insist that a patient under treatment should never be awakened even to take medicine. There is no symptom they welcome so cordially in a patient as a natural sleep, and no change from which they expect more favorable results.

The effect of being awakened from a sound sleep is always unpleasant. It is apt to make one unsocial and irritable. Any such abrupt recall to worldly cares induces a feeling of discontent, such as usually accompanies all unwelcome changes of condition or unpleasant interruptions. Nor is it without significance that grown people pretty universally prefer to be left alone for some time after waking, while we rarely find any who have been much immersed in worldly cares whose friends are not content to leave them alone for a time after waking.

It is the struggle we experience in exchanging abruptly the society we may have left in the land of dreams for that which we meet in the forum or on the exchange that has brought some stimulating beverages, such as coffee or tea or beer, into such general u se early in the day throughout the world. On waking, and before we experience any appetite for food, we are prone to welcome an exhilarant of some sort to overcome our reluctance to return to the disciplinary life into which we were born to be trained.

The most compact and instructive statement of the physical evils that follow the privation of sleep that has fallen under my eyes will be found in a work entitled Diseases of Modern Life. The author, Benjamin Wark Richardson, was for many years, and until his comparatively recent death, one of the leading members of the Royal College of Physicians in London. In the eighteenth chapter of this work, treating of disease from late hours and broken sleep, he says:

“Although it is impossible to define in one term any one disease originating from irregular sleep and late hours of retiring to rest, there are certain impairments resulting from these habits which influence the course of the health and help materially to shorten life…

“If, in the period of his early life, a man breaks the rule against nature and by a strong and persistent effort of the will accustoms himself to short and disturbed rest, the signs of distress which the unrefreshed body first feels are modified, and extremely short hours of sleep may become the rule of life…

“In time, sleeplessness acquired by habit becomes a practice which, when the body has arrived at full maturity and more rest from sleep is absolutely demanded, is not easily thrown aside. At such stage the bad habit tells on the life, and the physician finds no class of patients so difficult to treat successfully, even for ere functional derangements, as the habitually sleepless. There is about the patient a restless anxiety, an irritability, and a nervous feebleness which no artificial aid can, entirely, subdue…

“In adolescents, even if they be, naturally, of sound constitution and firm build, deficient sleep is a persistent source of mental and bodily exhaustion. It induces pallor, muscular debility, restlessness, and irritability. It interferes with that natural growth and nutrition of the body to which sound sleep so beneficently ministers, and it makes the work and the pleasure of the wakeful day unduly heavy and laborious.

“These remarks apply to members of both the sexes, but they especially apply to girls. The anemia, bloodlessness, weakness, and hysterical excitability that characterize the young lady of modern life, who is neither well nor ill, are due, mainly, to her bad habit of taking too limited a supply of sleep at irregular hours.

“The feebleness which falls to the lot of the robust who deprive themselves in youth, or who are deprived, of the due amount of sleep, taken in due season, is greatly increased, and is of much more serious moment, when it falls to those who by hereditary taint are disposed to an acute wasting disease–to pulmonary consumption, to name the most familiar example…

“From adolescence on towards the close of that period of age where the body reaches the period when the maturity is attained and the downward course of life is not yet on hand, the strong man can resist sleep often for long periods. He is apt, in consequence, to trespass on the liberty he ventures to take with nature; and when from any cause he chooses to take the liberty, he congratulates himself, perchance, on the impunity with which he is able to violate the natural. The delusion is not of very long duration. As the middle of the second stage of his career approaches the demand for more sleep becomes more urgent, and happy is he who at this crisis can recall to his service the friend he has deserted.

“If in middle age the habit of taking deficient and irregular sleep be still maintained, every source of depression, every latent form of disease, is quickened and intensified. The sleepless exhaustion allies itself with all other processes of exhaustion, or it kills imperceptibly by a rapid introduction of premature old age, which leads directly to premature dissolution…

“The effect of irregular hours and of deficiency of sleep is developed sometimes in another way.

“When the exhaustion from prolonged sleeplessness is felt it is demonstrated through the heart. Intermittent action of the heart is established, and all the evils belonging to that broken movement are set in train. This state of things is most readily induced in those persons who, while losing their natural rest, are engaged in working against time. Newspaper reporters and night pressmen are very quickly influenced in this manner, and become disabled before they are fully alive to their disablement.

They feel at times a strange sensation of faintness or coldness coming over them, as if they were suddenly enveloped in a haziness or obscurity; but, by applying more desperately to their work, they dash the sensation aside until it returns too often to be disposed of so readily. Then they are discovered to be suffering from exhausted brain and irregular circulation.

“Another effect is sometimes witnessed, and is the most distressing of all. It is that the sleeplessness acquired by habit begets sleeplessness. The most extreme insomnia is herewith induced, and the mind, knowing no rest by night or by day, is quickly off its balance. the very idea that sleep will not come under any circumstances, unless it be enticed by powerful narcotics, is itself preventive of all natural repose, and as the dread of the sleeplessness increases other morbid trains of thought arise in rapid succession. Some hypochondriacal monomania seizes the sufferer; he imagines the most improbably accidents are about to happen to him; he is constantly restless; he bites his nails to the quick, or keeps up some peculiar motion of his limbs, a rat-tat on the table or a gesticulatory action of an exaggerated character. A man circumstanced in this manner passes, usually, with steady advance, into insanity–too often into suicide…

“I have said that those who sleep differently and irregularly are more easily affected by direct causes of disease and are less amenable to means of cure.

To this should be added the equally important fact that those who are habituated to full and regular sleep are those who recover most readily from sickness. The observation of this truth led Menander to teach that sleep is the natural cure of all disease. It is so. Sleep reduces fever, quickens nutrition, increases elimination, soothes pain, and encourages the healing of wounded surfaces. Whoever is first to discover the still secret cause of natural sleep and the mode in which it may be commanded by art, for the service of mankind, will be the greatest healer who has, up to this age, helped to make medicine immortal.”

The length of time a man can preserve his mental faculties without sleep varies more or less with the constitution, but the inevitable result is delirium before many days. The Chinese punish a certain class of flagrant crimes by constantly teasing the criminal to prevent his sleeping, and it is among the punishments regarded by them with most horror. Historians report that Perseus, the last king of ancient Macedonia, while a prisoner of the Romans, was “done to death” in this way by his guards. They would not permit him to sleep.

When the first Napoleon attempted the conquest of Hayti, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had become commander-in-chief of Haytians, could not venture a pitched battle with the battalions of Napoleonic veterans, but had recourse to a less risky though more effective method of warfare. As soon as the French troops got to sleep at night, Toussaint made a feint of attacking them, thus getting them all up and under arms. This was repeated so frequently as effectually to prevent their getting any rest, and in a few weeks an army of thirty thousand veterans, without a single engagement in the field, was reduced to about five thousand effectives, through disease induced mainly, if not entirely, by want of sleep. It is reported that the policy of the Haytian patriot was prosecuted by the insurgents in Cuba in their late war of independence.

Is it not obvious that something goes on during sleep which is a preventative of mania; some change is wrought that could not be wrought until the patient was liberated from the bondage of his worldly environment, and made accessible to influences of some kind which could not approach him while under such bondage, and that those influences are soothing, civilizing, harmonizing, fraternizing, elevating.

The predatory animals, as a rule, seek their prey at night and their repose by day. They differ in this respect from all tamed or domesticated animals. It is also to be observed that they subsist chiefly upon the food of other animals, and are therefore, ever at war with the whole animal kingdom, not always sparing their own progeny. Like the dangerous classes of human society, they take advantage of the darkness to better conceal their purposes, and for the greater chance of finding their prey asleep or off its guard.

To domesticate or tame a wild animal, it is necessary to win its confidence by protecting it from its predatory fellows and accustoming it to sleep without fear. On the other hand, the domesticated animal soon becomes wild and dangerous if its sleep is disturbed; cows fall off in their yield of milk; hens will not lay; sheep will not fatten.

Wild beasts are always lean, or, rather, never fat, partly, no doubt, if not entirely, because of their precarious livelihood, which compels them to be constantly on the alert by night as well as by day.

The savage tribes, who for the most part lead predatory lives, are so much exposed to surprises that they rarely get regular or sufficient sleep, and take their rest as they take their food, when they can get it, but without periodicity or regularity. This goes far to explain not only why they are savage, but why their average longevity is much less than that of civilized peoples.

As they emerge from the savage state they begin to organize into societies for mutual protection, to share one another’s burdens, and to secure social privileges, of which regular and abundant sleep is one to which all the other are secondary. That is the “pillar of fire by night” which guides them from a life of barbaric selfishness towards a higher life of mutual forbearance and fraternity. The policeman’s rattle is the official symbol of civilization, for upon the forces it rallies to the defence of order we depend for our undisturbed repose during the hours when darkness offers a partial immunity to crime.

The venomous snake, which is the s symbol of all which is most detested and detestable in the animal kingdom, never closes its eyes. They are covered with a sort of scale, transparent, like glass, which allows perfect vision, and yet is strong enough to protect the eyes from the ordinary accidents of snake life. While warm blooded animals shut their eyelids to exclude the light when they sleep and the pupils relax or open, in the serpent this action is reversed–the pupil contracts like a cat’s in the sunlight. It is a curiously suggestive and, I believe, a well authenticated fact, that the most deadly serpents the Viperidae and Boidae, are cat-eyed and night-prowlers. Except when thirsty, they will rarely be seen moving about in the daytime. The Colubridae, or common, harmless snakes, on the other hand have round pupils, sleep at night, and are active chiefly during sunlight hours.

Profesor W.E. Leonard, of Minneapolis, has given a most interesting account of the pathogenetic effects of what is known in medical literature as lachesis. The late Dr. Herring, of Philadelphia, and his brave wife are its hero and heroine. Lachesis is the common name of a deadly poisonous serpent named by Linnæus Trigonocephalus lachesis, partly from its lance-shaped head, and partly from one of the Greek Fates, and because of the swift and fatal effects of its bite.

Herring, in his Condensed Materia Medica, enumerates persistent sleeplessness among the pathogenetic symptoms from which lachesis is a specific, on the homeopathic principle that the hair of the dog that bites will cure, or similia similibus curantur. Also, “children toss about, moaning during sleep.”

I refer to the venom of the lachesis as a remedial agent, because it is, I believe, a rare, if not the only instance of any deadly serpent’s venom having been tested, and its effects upon the human system carefully noted in minute detail, and classified by a professional man eminently qualified for such a task. It will be observed that the most conspicuous effect of this poison is hostility to sleep, and when sleep does intervene it aggravates all other symptoms, as if it and sleep were the deadliest and wholly unreconcilable enemies. It achieves its victories over its victims more swiftly than mere privation of sleep induced by most other causes is supposed to, but in both cases privation of sleep seems to be the one symptom without the concurrence of which none of the others would necessarily be fatal.

When we reflect that the serpent in all ages has been the symbol of what was most fatal to man’s peace; that it was the serpent that first brought temptation and disobedience into the world; that with the Greeks the head of Medusa, with its snaky hair, was the symbol of paralyzing influence of vice; that Mercury’s wand was composed of the figures of two fighting serpents, and that he himself commenced his career as a divinity by stealing the oxen of Apollo; when we reflect that serpent-worship prevails almost universally among savages, who fear the power and cunning of serpents, and try to propitiate them by paying them divine honors; and moreover, if it be true, as there is ample warrant for presuming, “a reason more perfect than reason, and influenced by its partialities, is at work in us when we sleep”; if, as the pagan philosopher affirmed, “the night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul”; if our Father which is in heaven “giveth his beloved in their sleep,” how naturally and instinctively we associate the serpent’s deadly bite, so fatal to sleep and life, with the fearful curse denounced against the first of the reptiles of whom we have any record, through whose subtlety, temptation and sin first came into the world. Hence perhaps it is that the serpent in the Bible symbolizes every form of temptation to evil or sin, and hence, only in our sleep are the weapons forged with which we can successfully contend with them.

Shakespeare, who was no less unapproachable for his philosophic insight than as a poet, makes Cesar say:

“Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights;
Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
…but I fear him not;
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius.

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort,
As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit,
That could be mov’d to smile at anything.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves;
And therefore are they very dangerous.”

Brutus was selected by the partisans hostile to Cæsar to be the leader in the conspiracy against him, because, as Cassius expressed it:

“He sits high in all the people’s hearts:
And that which would appear offence in us,
His countenance, like the richest alchemy,
Will change to virtue and to worthiness.”

After calling his servant Lucius several times without receiving any reply–it is after midnight and the man is asleep–Brutus exclaims:

“I would it were my fault to sleep so soundly.”

In the same scene Lucius is again caught napping. Brutus calls:

“Boy! Lucius!–Fast asleep? It is no matter;
Enjoy the heavy honey-dew of slumber:
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.”

When Lucius is gone and leaves Brutus alone, he says:

“Since Cassius first did whet me against Cæsar,
I have not slept
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasm or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.”

The pertinacity with which Shakespeare dwells upon the sleeplessness of Brutus from the time he began to entertain the suspicion that the liberties of Rome depended upon the immediate death of Cæsar, is one of the marvels of this marvelous play. A little later in the piece, when Cassius apologizes for entering and disturbing Brutus’s rest, Brutus replies that he has been awake all night. In the same scene Portia, his wife, enters to remonstrate with him:

Brutus. Portia, what mean you… now?
It is not for your health thus to commit
Your weak condition to the raw-cold morning.
Portia. Nor for yours neither. You’ve ungently, Brutus
Stole from my bed: and yesternight, at supper,
You suddenly arose, and walk’d about,
Musing and signing, with your arms across;
And when I ask’d you what the matter was,
You star’d upon me with ungentle look:
But with an angry wafture of your hand,
Gave sign for me to leave you: so I did;
Fearing to strengthen that impatience
Which seem’d too much enkindled… Dear my lord,
Make me acquainted with your cause of grief.
Brutus. I am not well in health, and that is all.
Portia. Brustus is wise, and were he not in health,
He would embrace the means to come by it.
Brutus. Why, so I do.–Good Portia, go to bed.
Portia. Is Brutus sick?...
And will he steal out of his wholesome bed,…
And tempt the rheumy and unpurged air
To add unto his sickness? No, my Brutus;
You have some sick offence within your mind,
Which, by the right and virtue of my place,
I ought to know of: and, upon my knees,
I charm you, by my once-commended beauty,
By all your vows of love, and that one great vow
Which did incorporate and make us one,
That you unfold to me, yourself, your half,
Why you are heavy; and what men to-night
Have had resort to you,–for here have been
Some six or seven, who did hide their faces
Even from darkness.

I am still far from having exhausted all that Shakespeare has to teach us on the subject of sleep or its privation. Whatever takes a deep hold upon a mind like Shakespeare’s can always be studied with profit, and the prominence he gave to both in his plays warrants the belief that few of the phenomena of sleep or of sleeplessness escaped his incomparable powers of observation. No one familiar with his plays will often think of sleep as a condition of existence without being reminded of that thrilling soliloquy of Henry IV.:

“How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep!–O Sleep, O gentle Sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down,
Nor steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, Sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfum’d chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull’d with sounds of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leav’st the kingly couch
A watch case or a common ‘larum bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamor in the slippery shrouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?–
Canst thou, O partial Sleep, give they repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Queen Margaret thus brings her curse of the villainous Gloster to a climax:

“No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!”

Lady Percy says to Hotspur:

“Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and curs’d melancholy
…
Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?”

The Abbess in “The Comedy of Errors” says to Adriana:

“The venom-clamors of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad-dog’s tooth.
It seems his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing:
…
In food, in sport, in life-preserving rest
To be disturb’d, would mad or man or beast.”

With exquisite art Shakespeare makes Macbeth expatiate upon the blessedness of “innocent sleep” after his murder of Duncan, and after he had forfeited forever the capacity of enjoying it himself:

“Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’–the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourishers in life’s feast.”

Later on in the same play we read:

“With him above
To ratify the work–we may again
Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights.”

In the first scene of the second act of “The Tempest,” when Alonzo notes that several of his companions who escaped from the wreck had suddenly gone to sleep, he says:

What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyes
Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts: I find
They are inclined to do so.
Seb.– Please you, sir,
Do not omit the heavy offer of it:
It seldom visits sorrow; when it doth,
It is a comforter.

Iago, after poisoning the jealous nature of Othello, says:

“Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”

The Witch, in enumerating the calamities in store for the Sailor in “Macbeth,” says:

“In fact, Moses, and Egyptian priest, who possessed a part of the country called (Delta?), left there to go into Judea, having taken a disgust for the institutions of his country. With him parted a great number of men who honored the divinity. He said and taught that the Egyptians and the Libyans were fools to pretend to represent the divinity in the figures of ferocious or domestic animals; that the Greeks were no wiser when they gave Him the human figure.

According to him, divinity was nothing else than that which envelops us–the eareth and the sea–to wit, what we call heaven, the world, or nature. Now what sensible man would dare to represent this divinity by an image made on the model of one of us?

He required them, therefore, to renounce all manufacture of idols, to limit their honors to divinity by dedicating to it a place and a sanctuary worthy of it without any image. It was necessary also that those who were subjects for happy dreams should come to this sanctuary to sleep, in order to acquire their inspirations for them and for others, for the wise and the just had always to expect from the divinity goods, favors, signs; but this expectation is interdicted to other mortals.

“By this discourse Moses persuaded a large number of men of sense, and led them into the country where is rising to-day the city of Jerusalem.”

Pomponius Mela is another pagan writer who speaks of the practice in Italia-Græca of sleeping in temples for the purpose of securing revelations by dreams.

We have already quoted the statement of Iamblichus, “that numbers of sick, by sleeping in the temple of Æsculapius, have had their cure revealed to them in dreams vouchsafed by the god.”

Samuel, while a child, slept in the temple of the Lord where the ark of God was. It was there that the Lord called him by name and prepared him to become one of his prophets.1

Among the Hebrews the practice seems to have been quite common. We are told in Luke xi. 26, that Anna the Prophetess, who had been a widow fourscore-and-four years, “departed not from the temple, worshipping with fastings and supplications night and day.”

Solomon went to Gibeon to sacrifice; “the people sacrificed only in high places, because there was no house built for the name of the Lord until those days.” Gibeon was the great high place, which meant the place where there was a house built for the name of the Lord.

It was while there, we are told, that the lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and because he asked the Lord to give him an understanding heart to judge his people that he might discern between good and evil, and did not ask for riches and long life, the Lord gave him not only for what he asked, but riches and honor as well, “so that there should be no kings like him in all his days,” and a contingent promise to lengthen his days.

So in Hosea it is said:

“The Lord hath also a controversy with Judah, and will punish Jacob according to his ways; according to his doings will he recompense him. In the womb he took his brother by the heel; and in his manhood he had power with God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed: he wept, and made supplication unto him: he found him at Beth-el, and there he spake with us: even the Lord, the God of hosts.”

It does not seem to have occurred to any of these authorities that this greater accessibility to spiritual influence might have been due only to the more complete abstraction from the world which such a retreat encourages.

Dean Swift, in a letter to Pope, August 30, 1716, says: “I know it was anciently the custom to sleep in temples for those who would consult the oracles.

‘Who dictates to me slumbering,’” etc.2

I am indebted to dr. Carl Abel, a learned German philologist, for a clipping from the Berlin Woche, one of the most prominent of German illustrated weeklies, which he accompanies with the following remarks:

“It [the clipping] actually alleges the continuance to this day in a Roman Catholic village near Vienna of the ancient Jewish practice of sleeping in hallowed precincts with a view to being favored with inspired dreams. At Jerusalem it was the temple that promised inspiration; at Vienna, or, rather, at Salmannsdorf, it is a sacred wood. In the ancient dispensation the communication expected was to enable the recipient to discern the tendency of the divine will in a matter of serious import. At present the oracle sought after seems generally to refer to the choice of lottery tickets.”

1 I Samuel iii. 19.

2 Milton.

The following is a translation of the clipping from the Woche, August 2, 1902:

“HOLY FOREST.–A quite unusual picture may be seen within five minutes’ distance of the great city of Vienna, in the forest of Salmannsdorf. The trees at the entrance of the forest are hung with oil paintings and engravings, etchings, bronzes, marbles, etc.–a real art gallery created by religious people, among which connoisseurs will recognize many valuable pieces, suffering from exposure to the weather. This place about which there are many stories current, is considered holy and is called ‘Forest Prayer.’ Crowds of superstitious sleep there in the hope of dreaming the lucky numbers to be played for in the Austrian lotteries.”

To this it is pleasant to add some wise observations of a Russian lady who has recently published a work of substantial value on the pathology of sleep:

“All the complicated conditions of social existence to which during waking life we are all obliged to conform or to resist, are eliminated during sleep and the psychic life of dreams unrolls freely without the impeding fetters of social laws. It cannot be denied that these social laws, which surround every human existence, sometimes become a heavy burden, and that they develop at the same time a certain hypocrisy in feeling and thought and action, and thus give rise to endless falsehood and deceit.

In sleep all this changes. We are delivered from the heavy burden imposed by those vital conditions which by virtue of historical development have gained a certain empire in a given nation or society, but which are very often at the same time not merely opposed to the desires and impulses of men, but even injurious to the development and well-being of individuals who live in the midst of the nation or society.

From all these conventional chains we are liberated during sleep and brought, as it were, face to face with nature. During sleep–as the philosophic physiologist, Burdach, remarked–all social differences disappear; and men attain that perfect equality which in the waking state they can only dream of.”1

Lord Byron told George Ticknor that he wrote the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers at his paternal estate in the country the winter before he set forth on his travels, while a heavy fall of snow was on the ground, and he kept house for a month, during which time he never saw the light of day, rising in the evening after dark and going to bed in the morning before dawn.

What better, what other explanation could be given of the tone, spirit, and purpose of this brutal satire than this systematic and persistent violation of the laws of nature for a whole month, during which time noxious stimulants were to a large extent a substitute for wholesome sleep?

The medical profession throughout the world has generally accepted Hufeland’s division of a day of time as incontestably the most rational–that is: eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for nourishment, corporal exercise, and recreation.

Humboldt, of delicate health in his youth, like Napoleon and Leibnitz, is reported to have allowed himself but three hours’ sleep in every twenty four, and that, despite the enormous activity of his mind, he attained a very advanced age. Lest one should attach undue importance to such an eminent example, I will quote one or two extracts which deserve, I think, to be carefully weighed in the balance against Humboldt’s practice, if that practice is correctly reported.

1 Sleep: it’s Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene, and Psychology. By Marie Manaceine, p. 112.

Schmettau, in his Life of Frederick William the Fourth, says, in speaking of Humboldt’s Cosmos,

“in which, without any thought of the Creator, he faithfully describes nature and everything which man has been able to prize there, regardless of the Bible, which only exalts the acts of the Creator without occupying itself with the achievements of men. The man who, in combining the results of an existence of eighteen lustres has only succeeded in blasting himself with his own self-sufficiency and in proudly leaving God on one side, living without thought of Him, cannot yet have penetrated to the sources of wisdom the fruit of which is peace to the soul. The influence which Humboldt has exerted on his age will probably profit no one except the powers which wish to destroy that peace.”

G. Menzel, in his History of Modern Times, speaking of the Cosmos, says:

“It was in express conflict with the Bible as the Book of Books. In his expose of the totality of nature there is no veneration nor mention of the Creator. Nature appears there as an indifferent substance which only acquires importance as it is recognized and employed by man. Humboldt takes no account of the Creator and essence of things, only of the man who discovers, explains, and invents.

He only exalts the human intellect as an explorer, and works entirely in the sense of the Hegelian philosophy, in which God exists only so far as he is the object of the thought of man. Under Humboldt’s influence the natural sciences in Germany, with scarcely an exception, were turned against Christianity.”

Would Humboldt have left such a deplorable record among his most enlighted contemporaries had he divided his day as recommended by Hufeland?

Referring here once more to the ancient practice of sleeping in temples for the sake of securing important visions of revelations, it is related of Ion, the daughter of Cadmus, that she had temples in Greece and Rome. The Romans identified her with Albune or Albula or Albuna, a nymph claimed by her worshippers to be endowed with prophetic powers. It was the custom of those who consulted her to sleep in the temples, and what they wished to know was expected to be revealed to them in a dream or vision during sleep.

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.