10 



ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



although apparently helpless and lifeless; but where is the 

 spirit ? Upon this interesting problem the savage imagines that 

 light is shed by the experience of dreams. In a dream the 

 spirit appears to quit the body and to become independent of 

 all corporeal limitation ; to enter a new world, to participate in a 

 new existence, to emancipate itself from the conditions of time 

 and space, to hear strange voices, and to see unwonted sights 

 such as are impossible to it and inconceivable in its waking 

 hours; to consort freely with friends and kinsmen, with 

 strangers and enemies, and not less freely with the dead than 

 with the living; and to realize sensations of joy and sorrow, 

 delight and disappointment, hope, fear, anticipation and failure, 

 in which the body neither claims nor is capable of claiming any 

 part. And the savage argues that, if this is so, then the spirit 

 has actually been where it has seemed to be, and has actually 

 done what it has seemed to do, has actually suffered what it 

 has seemed to suffer ; in other words, that it has lived for a 

 time a life of its own, apart from the body. 



Modern anthropologists have often insisted upon the vital 

 part played by dreams in the origin of religion. " Tiie ideas of 

 religion," says Lord Avebury,* " among the lower races of man 

 are intimately associated with, if they have not originated from, 

 the condition of man during sleep, and especially from 

 dreams." 



Dreams have been commonly held, in the judgment of 

 primitive peoples, to attest the reality of spiritual beings 

 external to man ; but they afford still stronger testimony, in 

 that same judgment, to the reality of the life which the spirit 

 lives independently of the body. For dreams would be no 

 less impressive upon the minds of savages in the infancy 

 of human experience than they are now upon the minds 

 of children ; it would be impossible to shake off the 

 consciousness of their usual constant effect, and the imaginations 

 of dreamland would constantly tend to become more and more 

 the realities of the primitive world. 



But sleep is not the only phenomenon which would suggest to 



* Onjin of Civilization, ch. G, p. 225. 



