BELIEFS ABOUT THE SOUL. 203 



life. His body lies immovable, life and warmth remain with, it, 

 his breath comes and goes, his pulse throbs as in his waking hours, 

 but he in the mean time has traversed leagues and leagues of for- 

 ests, crossed broad rivers, scalped an enemy, or killed some savage 

 wild beast. Upon the supposition of a dual soul, the mystery of 

 his sleep is at once explicable. While one soul stays and watches 

 over the body, the other soul has gone out to roam over the world 

 at will. 



This explanation of dreams seems to have received wide-spread 

 recognition alike with the early civilized and savage races of men. 

 The Chinese thought that the soul in dreams went out in a nightly 

 ramble even to foreign lands. One day when the " spiritual man " 

 of T'ih Kwalee, one of the gentry, was out roaming around, a 

 wild beast found his body and ate it ; so, when the spirit returned, 

 it found only the skeleton, but fortunately near by was a beggar's 

 corpse, black and lame ; this he took as a substitute for his own 

 body, and always afterward walked with a staff.* The Japanese 

 believe that, if a sleeper is wakened suddenly and violently, he 

 will die, because his soul is then rambling at a distance, and can 

 not return to the body in time before it is awakened. This soul 

 is supposed to have form and color, and to be a small, round, black 

 body, and its adventures, when in the disembodied state, form a 

 standard subject for Japanese novels and imaginative literature. f 

 Pliny tells us that the soul of Hermotinus, one of the embodi- 

 ments of Pythagoras, was in the habit of leaving his body and 

 wandering into distant countries, whence it brought back numer- 

 ous accounts of various things which could not have been ob- 

 tained by any one but a person who was present. The body in 

 the mean time was left apparently lifeless. At last his enemies 

 burned the body, so that the soul on its return was, as it were, 

 deprived of its sheath. J St. Augustine tells the story of a man 

 who visited another and expounded a certain passage in Plato 

 which formerly he had refused to do, and afterward, when ques- 

 tioned why he had changed his mind, denied that he had, but 

 admitted that in a dream he had expounded the passage.* At the 

 Temple of Isis, in Alexandria, an Egyptian priest, in the presence 

 of Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry, drew a magical circle on 

 the ground, decked out with the customary astrological signs, and 

 then invoked from the body of Plotinus his own soul, so that he 

 stood face to face with it. || Goethe ^ positively asserts that he 



* Du Bose, " Dragon, Image, and Demon," pp. 369, 422. 

 f Griffis, " The Mikado's Empire," p. 472. 



X "Natural History," vol. vii, p. 53. 



* "De Civitate Dei," vol. xxviii, p. IS. 



I Draper, " Intellectual Development of Europe," vol. i, p. 404. 

 ^ Elam, "A Physician's Problems," p. 3o6. 



