420 PSYCHOLOGY. 



well as ourselves. My friend Professor W. K. Brooks, of 

 the Johns Hopkins University, told me of his large and 

 noble dog being frightened into a sort of epileptic fit by a 

 bone being drawn across the floor by a thread which the 

 dog did not see. Darwin and Romanes have given similar 

 experiences.* The idea of the supernatural involves that 

 the usual should be set at naught. In the witch and hob- 

 goblin supernatural, other elements still of fear are brought 

 in — caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like.f 

 A human corpse seems normally to produce an instinctive 

 dreadjwhich is no doubt somewhat due to its mysteriousness, 

 and which familiarity rapidly dispels. But, in view of the 

 fact that cadaveric, reptilian, and underground horrors play 

 so specific and constant a part in many nightmares and 

 forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask 

 whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a 

 former period have been more normal objects of the envi- 

 ronment than now. The ordinary cock-sure evolutionist 

 ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, and 

 the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the 

 consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually 

 overlaid in us by experiences of more recent date. 



There are certain other pathological fears, and certain 

 peculiarities in the expression of ordinary fear, which 

 might receive an explanatory light from ancestral con- 

 ditions, even infra-human ones. In ordinary fear, one may 



* Cf. Romanes, Mental Evolution, etc., p. 156. 



fin the 'Overland Monthly 'for 1887, a most interesting article on 

 Laura Bridgman's writings has been published by Mr. E C. Sand ford. 

 Among other remiui.scences of her early childhood, Avhile she still knew 

 nothing of the sign-language, the wonderful blind deaf-mute records the 

 following item in her quaint language : "My father [he was a farmer and 

 probably did his own butchering] used to enter his kitchen bringing some 

 killed animals in and deposited them on one of sides of the j-oom many 

 times. As I perceived it it make me shudder Avith terror because I did not 

 know what the matter was. I hated to approach the dead. One morning 

 I went to take a short walk with my Mother I went into a snug house for 

 some time. They took me into a room where there was a cotiin. I put 

 my hand in the coffin & felt something so queer. It frightened me 

 unpleasantly. I found something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so care- 

 fully. It must have been a body that had had vitality. ... I did not like 

 to venture to examine the body for I was confounded." 



