DREAMS AND ILLUSIONS. 271 



all classes, after the death of children, of a husband 

 or wife, whom they have injured or imagine that 

 they have injured, either during life or by not 

 fulfilling their last wishes, declare in all good faith 

 that the form of the dead is often present to their 

 memory and visible while they are awake ; thus im- 

 plying that the dead mercifully appear to comfort 

 their mourning friends, or else to reproach them for 

 not fulfilling their promises. In a word, these images 

 did not seem to them to be subjective, and an ordinary 

 phenomenon of the memory, but objective and personal 

 apparitions within the soul. The cases are not rare 

 in certain dispositions of mind, in which the projection 

 of these images on the memory gradually produces 

 madness. We must not forget that psychical 

 phenomena in general are very differently regarded by 

 the savage and the civilized man, since the latter is 

 accustomed to analysis, and to the real distinctions of 

 things. If this canon is forgotten we shall fall into 

 grave errors in the attempt to interpret the evolution 

 and primitive history of thought and of humanity. 



We shall more readily understand the nature and 

 genesis of all these hallucinations, and of normal and 

 abnormal illusions, if we study another phenomenon 

 of frequent occurrence which I myself have often had 

 occasion to observe. I mean the illusion or hallucina- 

 tion which does not consist in the absolute projection 

 of an internal image with an external semblance of 

 reality, but which presents it in the twilight as an 



