MYTHOLOGIC PHILOSOPHY. 59 



broken and inverted sequences. Now and then the dream-scenes are 

 enacted in real life, and the infrequent coincidence or apparent verifi- 

 cation makes deep impression on the mind, while unfulfilled dreams are 

 forgotten. Thus the dreams of sleepers are attributed to their imma- 

 terial duplicates — their spirits. In many diseases, also, the mind seems 

 to wander, to see sights, and to hear sounds, and to have many won- 

 derful experiences, while the body itself is apparently unconscious. 

 Sometimes on restored health, the person may recall these wonderful 

 experiences, and during their occurrence the subject talks to unseen 

 persons, and seems to have replies and to act, to those who witness, in 

 such a manner that a second self — a spirit independent of the body — 

 is suggested. When disease amounts to long-continued insanity, all 

 of these effects are greatly exaggerated, and make a deep impression 

 upon all who witness the phenomena. Thus the hallucinations of fever- 

 racked brains, and mad minds, are attributed to spirits. 



The same conditions of apparent severance of mind and body wit- 

 nessed in dreams and hallucinations are often* produced artificially in 

 the practice of ecstacism. In the vicissitudes of savage life, while 

 little or no provision is made for the future, there are times when the 

 savage resorts to almost anything at hand as a means of subsistence, 

 and thus all plants and all parts of plants, seed, fruit, flowers, leaves, 

 bark, roots — anything in times of extreme want — may be used as food. 

 But experience soon teaches the various effects upon the human sys- 

 tem which are produced by the several vegetable substances with which 

 he meets, and thus the effect of narcotics is early discovered, and the 

 savage in the practice of his religion oftentimes resorts to these native 

 drugs for the purpose of producing an ecstatic state under which divi- 

 nation may be performed. The practice of ecstacism is universal in 

 the lower stages of culture. In times of great anxiety, every savage and 

 barbarian seeks to knoAV of the future. Through all the earlier gene- 

 rations of mankind, ecstacism has been practiced, and civilized man has 

 thus an inherited appetite for narcotics to which the enormous propen- 

 sity to drunkenness existing in all nations bears witness. When the 

 great actor in his personation of Rip Van Winkle holds his goblet 

 aloft and says, " Here's to your health and to your family's, and may 

 they live long and prosper," he connects the act of drinking with a 

 prayer, and unconsciously demonstrates the origin of the use of stimu- 

 lants. It may be that when the jolly companion has become a loath- 

 some sot, and his mind is ablaze with the fire of drink, and he sees 

 uncouth beasts in horrid presence, that inherited memories haunt 

 him with visions of the beast-gods worshiped by his anoestors at the 

 very time when the appetite for stimulants was created. But ecsta- 

 cism is produced in other ways, and for this purpose the savage and 

 barbarian often resorts to fasting and bodily torture. In many ways 

 he produces the wonderful state, and the visions of ecstasy are inter- 

 preted as the evidence of spirits. 



