The body lay on a table
beside the lecturer, but he himself, his entity, was at the other
end of the room, on the furthest or highest of a set of benches
raised one above the other as at a theatre. He imagined himself in
a vague way to be disagreeing with the lecturer; but the strongest
impression on his mind was annoyance at being so badly placed, so
far from the professor and from his own body that he could not see
or hear without an effort. The dream, he pointed out, showed this
curious fact, that without any conscious design or effort of the
will a man may conceive himself to be in perfect possession of his
identity, whilst separated from his own body by a distance of
several feet. "The highest concept," said Jowett, "which man forms
of himself is as detached from the body." ("Life," ii. 241.) The
lecture-room which he imagined was one of the lower school-rooms at
Eton, with which he had been familiar in early days.
After Hayward's death in 1884, his own habits began to change. He
still dined at the Athenaeum "corner," but increasing deafness
began to make society irksome, and, his solitary meal ended, he
spent his evenings reading in the Library.
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