G76 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



Here I will re-exemplify the chief factors and stages in 

 this genesis of religious beliefs; citing, in large measure, 

 books that have been published since the first volume of this 

 work. 



585. The African savage Commoro, quoted above, and 

 shown by his last reply to be more acute than his questioner, 

 had no theory of dreams. To the inquiry how he accounted 

 for the consciousness of wandering while asleep, he said 

 * It is a thing I cannot understand.&quot; And here it may be 

 remarked in passing, that where there existed no conception 

 of a double which goes away during sleep, there existed no 

 belief in a double which survives after death. But with 

 savages who are more ready to accept interpretations than 

 Commoro, the supposition that the adventures had in dreams 

 are real, prevails. The Zulus may be instanced. To Bishop 

 Callaway one of them said : 



&quot;When a dead man comes [in a dream] he does not come in the 

 form of a snake, nor as a mere shade ; but he comes in very person, 

 just as if he was not dead, and talks with the man of his tribe ; and he 

 does not think it is the dead man until he sees on awaking, and says, 

 Truly I thought that So-and-so was still living ; and forsooth it is his 

 shade which has come to me. &quot; 



Similarly with the Andamanese (who hold that a man s 

 reflected image is one of his souls), the belief is that &quot; in 

 dreams it is the soul which, having taken its departure 

 through the nostrils, sees or is engaged in the manner repre 

 sented to the sleeper.&quot; 



Abnormal forms of insensibility are regarded as due to more 

 prolonged absences of the wandering double ; and this is so 

 whether the insensibility results naturally or artificially. That 

 originally, the accepted interpretations of these unusual states 

 of apparent unconsciousness were of this kind, we see in 

 the belief expressed by Montaigne, that the &quot; souls of men 

 when at liberty, and loosed from the body, either by sleep, or 

 some extasie, divine, foretel, and see things which whiLt 

 joyn d to the body they could not see.&quot; Then at the present 



