As for Sleep, which the dying Philosopher called the Brother of Death,* I do not see how it argues the Soul’s Mortality, more than a man’s inability to wake again: but rather helps us to conceive, how that though the stounds† and agonies of Death seem utterly to take away all the hopes of the Soul’s living after them; yet upon a recovery of a quicker Vehicle of Air, she may suddenly awake into fuller and fresher participation of life than before. But I may answer also, that Sleep being only the ligation‡ of the outward Senses, and the interception of motion from the external world, argues no more any radical defect of Life and Immortality in the Soul, than the having a man’s Sight bounded within the walls of his chamber by Shuts, does argue any blindness in the immured party; who haply is busie reading by candle-light, and that with ease, so small a Print as would trouble an ordinary Sight to read it by day. And that the Soul is not perpetually employ’d in Sleep, is very hard for any to demonstrate; we so often remembring our reams merely by occasions, which, if they had not occurr’d, we had never suspected we had dream’d that night.
Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), Book III, Chap. xiv
* ὁ ὕπνος θανάτου ἀδελφὸς. Aelian, Var. Hist. lib. 2, cap. 35. With reference to pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias Leontinus.
† stound - state of stupefaction or amazement
‡ ligation - condition of being bound, suspension (of the faculties)
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