July 29.
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The thought enshrined in these words was hackneyed even in Shakespeare's day and when he put them in Prospero's mouth he was expressing. in inimitable language. the universal thought of mankind. Anciently dreams were regarded much more seri ously than came to be the case when education was widely diffused. The world became sophisticated and the dream was considered to be but a jumble o: half remembered waking impressions, recollected in somnolence, Sometimes full of sound and fury but always signifying nothing. Later came Freud and his school of psycho analysts and the dream was again given a significance more veal, because on a more scientific basis, than had in the days when myths were realities.
The oldest book in the world not to consider Russia's point of view and to prepare for all possible contingencies. China appears perfectly convinced that Russia will presently offer negotiate as on the existing situation on the railway, But what if Russia does not fall in this comfortable belief?
Apart from the interested as-sections of Chinese news. agencies—which Russia has contradicted when they became too pointed—there is no visible evidence of any tendency on her part to negotiate, rather the reverse. We have always recognized the strength of China's case against. Russia, but in seizing the C.E.R., however excussable that may have been, committed a technical: illegality, which has given' the Soviet a stick with which to hit back: Tt ig clear that Russia did not regard' China's reply to her ultttells that the ancient Kings, *|Pharaoh of Egrpt and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, had a retinue of magi, astrologers and jsoothsayers whose business it was to interpret the dreams that came to the monarch in night visions upon his bed. We moderns laugh these things to scorn and hold the lore of the magicians to be nonsense. But, inthe light of the importance now given by scientists to the mind's unconscious working, there may have been a substratum of truth in the predict tions of the ancient cabalists. The Chinese have a proverb which asserts that "if you believe it, it is so. If you do not believe it, it is not so." Like most dark sayings this, too, has kernel of wisdom in it. Is it not written that' "according to your faith so. shall: it be unto you?" There: is in the human mind' a. vast unexplored region from whence come: the predilec-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.