Dec. 16, 1881.J 



KNOWLEDGE 



131 



accompanies, gws beforo, or follows him by sunlight 

 and by moonshine, disappearing mysteriously only when 

 these are -n-ithdrawn or intercepted. Still more com- 

 plete in its mimicry is the reflection of himself — the image 

 repeating every gesture, while perchance, as he stands 

 shouting by the stream, tlie echo of his voice is tlu-own 

 back from the hOl-side, and adds confirmation to his notion 

 of duality. How else can man at low stages of thinking, 

 ignorant of the laws that govern the reflection of both 

 sound and light, interpret the shadow and the echo ? Hence 

 it is that we find the word for " shadow " chosen to express 

 this other-self in both barbaric and civilised speedi, from 

 the dialects of North and South American and African 

 tribes, to the classic and modern languages, as wit- 

 ness the skia of the Greeks, the maiies or umbra 

 of the Romans, and the shade of our own tongue. 

 Did the limits of a brief paper allow, it would be easy 

 to show, from the evidence of language, liow man explained 

 to himself the mode in which this other self makes the 

 passage from the body to the external world, and wlierein 

 lay the difference between the sleeping and waking, the 

 living and lifeless body. It must suffice to say that 

 throughout the entire savage and civilized world, the life, 

 the spirit, the soul of man has been identified with breath. 

 Not ■nnth that alone; but with the blood, the heart, ifcc, 

 although chiefly and universally with the act of breathing, 

 " so cliaracteristic of the higher animals during life, and 

 coinciduig so closely with life in its departure." 



It is interesting to watch the primitive nebulous theories 

 of another self, a vaporous, ethereal, or otherwise unsub- 

 stantial, impalpable thing, condensing into theories of semi- 

 substantiality, or of rude or refined resemblance to the body, 

 theories which become indispensalile to account for the 

 appearance of both the living and the dead in dreams, 

 ■when their persons were clasped, their forms and faces 

 seen, their voices heard. 



Such theories dificr not in kind, but only in degree of 

 refinement, and unite, as Dr. Tylor remarks, "in an un- 

 broken line of mental connection," the savage fetish 

 worshipper and the civilised psychologist adding their 

 welcome witness to the similar working of untrained 

 intelligence in different ages among diflerent races on 

 corresponding levels of culture, and therefore, to the 

 underlying unity of our race. This we shall realise only 

 as we realise that the laws of mind, like those of matter, 

 are uniform, and appro.ximately calculable in their opera- 

 tion ; the phenomena of one interrelated and inter- 

 dependent as are the phenomena of the other, and 

 equally the subjects of observation and comparison, if 

 not by identical methods, yet on like principles. 



It would be an intere.sting and informing chapter in the 

 historj" of the illusions tlirough which man has made con- 

 tinuous, and as yet unaccomplished, passage to the truth, to 

 show how belief in indwelling spirits, of fitful habit and 

 varying form, was enlarged to belief in souls in the lower 

 animals, in plants, and in lifeless things, from stars to 

 stones ; how the phantasms of the brain have filled earth, 

 sea, and sky with spirits innumerable, from white-winged 

 celestials to the degraded ghosts of haunted houses. But 

 this would be an undue extension of the subject, for the 

 completeness of which some reference must be made to the 

 part played by dreams as supposed media of communica- 

 tion between gods and men, and as monitions of coming 

 events. 



The awe and wonder excited in the savage mind by 

 waving trees and swirling waters, by drifting cloud, 

 whistling wind, and stately march of sun and moon — all 

 invested by him with personal life and will — were im- 

 mensely quickened by his dreams. In their unrelated and 



bewildering incidents, the powers indwelling in all things 

 around him seemed to come nearer than in the more 

 monotonous events of the day, uttering their warnings and 

 conveying their messages. There needed but slender data 

 to reach conclusions. Let tlic death of a fi-iend be dreamt 

 of, and the event follow ; or a hunting-feast fill the half 

 torpid fanc}', and a d.ay's privation give the lie to the 

 dream ; the arbitrary relation is made. Lord Bacon says : — 

 " Men mark tlie hits, but not the misses," and a thousand 

 dreams unfulfilled count as nothing against one dream 

 fulfilled. Out of that a canon of interpretation is framed 

 by whicli whole races of men will explain their dreams, 

 never staying to wonder that the correspondences are not 

 more frequent and minute than they really are. 



" To this delusion," says Cornelius Agrippa, an ancient 

 rationalist, "not a few great philosophers have given a 

 little credit ... so far building upon examples of dreams, 

 which some accident hath made to be true, tliat thence they 

 endeavour to persuade men that there are no dreams but 

 what arc real." When Homer says that "dreams, too, 

 from Jove proceed,"* painting the vi\'idness and agonising 

 incompleteness of those passing visions ; when Tertullian 

 saj^s that " we receive dreams from God, there being no 

 man so foolish as never to liave known any dreams come 

 true," both classic and patristic opinion are clearly survivals 

 from the lower culture, its lineal and thinly-disguised de- 

 scendants. For the savage, the bard, and the theologian 

 lived in days when the conception of orderly sequence was 

 unthinkable to them ; where the arbitrary act was wrought, 

 the isolated or the conflicting influence manifest, there the 

 deity or the devil was present ; while for us, could we dis- 

 cover where law is not, thence God would seem to have 

 withdrawn. 



The passage from the crude interpretation of his dreams 

 by the savage to the formal elaboration of the dream-oracle 

 is obvious, the more so as this latter was only one of many 

 modes by which it was sought to divine the will of heaven, 

 and read that " book of fate " hidden from men. This 

 dream-lore, as ancient records far back to Accadian times 

 show, not only called into existence a class of men whose 

 position as interpreters of royal and other dreams ensured 

 them commanding place, but gave rise to a mass of litera- 

 ture most prolific in classic times. It maintained an almost 

 canonical supremacy down to the Middle Ages, finding its 

 befitting level in our day in the " Libri dei Sogni " which 

 the Italian lottery-gambler consults, and in the " Imperial 

 Dream-Book " by which the English domestic forecasts 

 whether ICing Cophetua or Police-sergeant X 32 is to be 

 her fate ! 



At this nether depth, Science, content with having shown 

 the persistence of primitive modes of thinking in all subse- 

 quent interpretation of liis own nature by man ; finding its 

 evidence and the warrant of its conclusions in that human 

 experience which the sources of our knowledge cannot 

 transcend ; may well let the matter rest. It need not 

 concern itself witli denials that dreams have been sent as 

 warnings from Heaven to man ; this were as foolisli as to 

 take pains to disprove the existence of ghosts, or to 

 seriously challenge the predictions in Zadkiel's Vox Stel- 

 la/ni.m. Science need not argue ; it explains ; and to such 

 matters explanation is death. For the changes which reve- 

 lation of the order of nature and the establishment of that 

 doctrine of continuity, which has no "favoured-nation" 

 clause for man, involve, will bring about, in quiet and 

 unmourned, the departure of belief in dreams as omens or 

 warnings, just as tliey have brought about the decay of 

 belief in witchcraft and astrology. 



» " Iliad," Book I., 77. 



