THE SYMBOLISM OF DREAMS 43 
and other senses besides hearing and sight—causes an impression of one 
sensory order to be automatically and involuntarily linked on to an 
impression of another totally different order. In other words, we may 
say that the one impression becomes the symbol of the other impression, 
for a symbol—which ig literally a throwing together—means that two 
things of different orders have become so associated that one of them 
may be regarded as the sign and representative of the other. 
There is, however, another still more natural and fundamental form 
of symbolism which is entirely normal, and almost, indeed, physiolog- 
ical. This is the tendency by which qualities of one order become 
symbols of qualities of a totally different order because they instinctively 
seem to have a similar effect on us. In this way, things in the physical 
order become symbols of things in the spiritual order. This symbolism 
penetrates indeed the whole of language; we can not escape from it. 
The sea is deep and go also may thoughts be; ice is cold and we say the 
same of some hearts; sugar is sweet, as the lover finds also the presence 
of the beloved; quinine is bitter and so is remorse. Not only our 
adjectives, but our substantives and our verbs are equally symbolical. 
To the etymological eye every sentence is full of metaphor, of symbol, 
of images that, strictly and originally, express sensory impressions of one 
order, but, as we use them to-day, express impressions of a totally dif- 
ferent order. Language is largely the utilization of symbols. This is 
a well-recognized fact which it is unnecessary to elaborate.* 
An interesting example of the natural tendency to symbolism, which 
may be compared to the allied tendency in dreaming, is furnished by 
another language, the language of music. Music is a representation of 
the world—the internal or the external world—which, except in so far 
as it may seek to reproduce the actual sounds of the world, can only be 
expressive by its symbolism. And the symbolism of music is so pro- 
nounced that it is even expressed in the elementary fact of musical 
pitch. Our minds are so constructed that the bass always seems deep 
to us and the treble high. We feel it incongruous to speak of a high 
bass voice or a deep soprano. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that 
this and the like associations are fundamentally based, that there are, 
as an acute French philosophic student of music, Dauriac (in an essay 
“Des Images Suggerées par lAudition musicale”) hag expressed it, 
“sensorial correspondences,” as, indeed, Baudelaire had long since 
divined ; that the motor image is that which demands from the listener 
the minimum of effort; and that music almost constantly evokes motor 
imagery.” 
*Ferrero, in his “Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme” (1895), deals 
broadly with symbolism in human thought and life. 
*The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons profuse and 
apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly comparable to a 
synesthesia. Heine was an example of this and he has described in “ Florentine 
