I give a talk with great spirit and energy in who knows what foreign university, and I say that histologists and physiologists must be weighed and not counted. That there are three classes of them:

• Those who worship truth and having great experience know when to change opinion; there are not more than l0 or 12 of these.
• Those who wish to be famous in order to succeed, but without seriousness and love of truth.
• And 3rd the iconoclasts, who deny or distort the facts by means of interpreting them, and whose ideal would be the [gap] of science and of all its prestige to be left alone with their machines, opinions and discoveries.

AFTERWORD

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a Nobel Prize winner for his work in neurology; he essentially discovered the neuron. For decades, Cajal disputed Freud's dream theories.

After retirement, he planned to publish a dream-journal that would disprove Freud's claim that every dream disguises a wish. Cajal thought instead that neurons who'd been squelched all day, that hold old memories or odd associations (including the occasional taboo desire, but generally random) find sleep a time to get harmless exercise, and we experience their workout-orgy as a dream. For Cajal, dreams mean nothing.

Except perhaps this one! Most of his dreams have notes judging them "Nonsense!" "Inconsistent!" "Absurd!" This is one of his rare dreams that doesn't.

I do wonder what that missing word in the typescript was (marked by [gap] here): abandonment, renunciation, death?

And I wonder if I fit in category one... or three.

Source: The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal by Benjamin Ehrlich, Oxford Univ. Press, 2017, p.100.

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