nation” clause for man. Its teaching is of order, not confusion; of
gradual development, not spasmodic advance; of banishment of all
catastrophic theories in the interpretation of the history of man as of
nature. In its exposition nothing is “common or unclean;” nothing too
trivial for notice in study of the growth of language, of law, of social
customs and institutions, of religion, or of aught else comprised in the
story of our race. The nursery rhyme and the “wise saw” embody the serious
belief of past times; ceremonial rites and priestly vestments preserve the
significance and sacredness gathering round the common when it becomes
specialised. And in this belief in spiritual powers and agencies within
and without, the line uniting the lower and the higher culture is
unbroken. Nor can it be otherwise, if it be conceded that the sources of
man’s knowledge do not transcend his experience, and that within the
limits of this we have to look for the origin of all beliefs, from the
crudest animism to the most ennobling conceptions of the Eternal.
“This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel.”
And yet we find this denied by professed scientists, whose minds are
built, as it were, in water-tight compartments. The theistic philosopher,
trembling at the bogey of human automatism, creates an Ego, “an entity
wherein man’s nobility essentially consists, which does not depend for its
existence on any play of physical or vital forces, but which makes these
forces subservient to its determinations.”[96] The biologist, shrinking
from the application of the theory of evolution to the descent of man,
argues that “his animality is distinct in nature from his rationality,
though inseparably joined during life in one common personality.” His body
“was derived from pre-existing materials, and therefore, only derivatively
created; that is, by the operation of secondary laws.” His soul, on the
other hand, was created in quite a different way, not by any pre-existing
means external to God Himself, but by the direct action of the Almighty
symbolised by the term “breathing.”[97] As this compound nature of man is
defended in a scientific treatise, the question that leaps to the lips is,
When did the inoculating action take place?--in the embryonic stage, or at
birth, or at the first awakenings of the moral sense?
Readers of that eccentric book, _The Unseen Universe_, published some
eight years ago, may remember that the authors built up a spiritual body
whose home lay beyond the visible cosmos.[98] Their argument was to the
following effect:--Just as light is held to result from vibrations of the
ether set in motion by self-luminous or light-reflecting bodies, so every
thought occasions molecular action in the brain, which gives rise to
vibrations of the ether. While the effect of a portion of our mental
activity is to leave a permanent record on the matter of the brain, and
thus constitute an organ of memory, the effect of the remaining portion is
to set up thought-waves across the ether, and to construct by these means,
in some part of the unseen universe, what may be called our “spiritual
body.” By this process there is being gradually built up, as the resultant
of our present activities, our future selves; and when we die our
consciousness is in some mysterious way transferred to the spiritual body,
and thus the continuity of identity is secured.
“Eternal form shall still divide
Th’ eternal soul from all beside.”
We may well quote the ancient words: “If they do these things in a green
tree, what shall be done in the dry?” The physicists, who thus locate the
soul in limitless space, and call it vibrations; the mathematician, who
said it must be extension; and the musician, who said, like Aristoxenus,
that it was harmony; the Cartesian philosopher, who locates it in the
pineal gland; the Costa Rican, who places it in the liver; the Tongans,
who make it co-extensive with the body; and the Swedenborgians, who assume
an underlying, inner self pervading the whole frame--these have met
together, the lower and the higher culture have kissed each other.
The tripartite division of man by the Rabbis, the Platonists, the
Paulinists, the Chinese, the mediæval theories of vegetal, sensitive, and
rational souls; what are these but the “other self” of savage philosophy
writ large? Plato’s number is found among the Sioux: of their three souls
one goes to a cold place, another to a warm place, and the third stays to
guard the body. Washington Matthews, in his _Ethnology and Philology of
the Hidatsa Indians_, says:--“It is believed by some of the Hidatsa that
every human being has four souls in one. They account for the phenomena of
gradual death, when the extremities are apparently dead while
consciousness remains, by supposing the four souls to depart, one after
another, at different times. When dissolution is complete, they say that
all the souls are gone, and have joined together again outside the body. I
have heard a Minsutaree quietly discussing this doctrine with an
Assinneboine, who believed in only one soul to each body.”
Let it not be thought that because science explains the earth-born origin
of some of man’s loftiest hopes, she makes claim to have spoken the last
word, and forbids utterance from any other quarter. The theologian is not
less free to assume such miraculous intervention in man’s development as
marks him nearer to the angel than to the ape, only his assumptions lie
beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. And it should be noted that whilst
science takes away, she gives with no niggard hand, so that the loss is
more seeming than real.
When belief in the earth’s central and supreme place in the universe was
surrendered at the bidding of astronomy, there was compensation in the
revelation of a universe to which thought can fix no limits. And if man
is bidden to surrender belief in his difference in kind from other living
creatures, he will be given the conception of a collective humanity whose
duties and destiny he shares. That conception will not be the destruction,
but the enlargement, of the field of the emotions, and, in contrasting the
evanescence of the individual with the permanence of the race, he may find
a profounder meaning in the familiar words--
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
§ XIII.
DREAMS AS OMENS AND MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN GODS AND MEN.
Reference has now to be made to the part played by dreams as supposed
channels of communication between heaven and earth; as portents, omens,
etc. The common belief among the nations of antiquity that they were sent
by the gods, and the like belief lurking in the minds of the superstitious
to this day, are the scarcely-altered survivals of barbaric confusion
respecting them.
When man had advanced from the earlier stages of undefined wonder and
bewilderment concerning the powers around and above him to anthropomorphic
conceptions of them, _i.e._ to making them in his own image, the events of
his dreams were striking confirmation of his notions about the constant
intervention of spiritual beings, gods, chiefs, and ancestors, in the
affairs of life. That personal life and will with which the rude
intelligence invests the objects of its awe; waving trees, swirling
waters, drifting clouds, whirling winds, stately march of sun and star,
seemed especially manifest in dreams and visions. In their unrelated and
bewildering, or, on the other hand, their surpassingly clear, incidents,
the powers indwelling in all things seemed to come nearer than in the less
sensational occurrences of the day, uttering their monitions, or making
known their will. They were the media by which this and that thing was
commanded or forbidden, or by which guidance and counsel and knowledge of
the future were given. To induce them, therefore, became a constant
effort. The discovery that fasting is a certain method of procuring them
is one reason of its prevalence in the lower culture. Amongst all the
indigenous races of North America abstinence has been practised as a chief
means of securing supernatural inspiration. The Redskin, to become a
sorcerer or to secure a revelation from his _totem_, or the Eskimo, to
become _Angekok_, will endure the most severe privations.
It is believed that whatever is seen in the first dream thus produced by
fasting becomes the manitou, or guardian spirit of life, corresponding to
the “daimon” of Socrates. And whoever by much fasting is favoured with
dreams, and cultivates the art of explaining them as bearing on the
future, becomes the feared and consulted “medicine man” of his tribe. His
_kee-keé-wins_, or records, are finally shown to the old people, who meet
together and consult upon them. They in the end give their approval, and
declare that he is gifted as a prophet, is inspired with wisdom, and is
fit to lead in the councils of the people.[99]
Very slender data were needed for the conclusions first drawn from dreams;
let the death of a friend or foe be the incident, and the event happen;
let a hunting-path fill the half-torpid fancy, and a day’s fasting follow;
let the mother of a young sportsman dream that she saw a bear in a certain
place, and the son, guided by her account, find the bear where indicated,
and kill it; the arbitrary relation is set up forthwith. As Lord Bacon
says, “Men mark the hits, but not the misses,” and a thousand dreams
unfulfilled count as nothing against one dream fulfilled. Out of that is
shaped, as dream-lore shows, a canon of interpretation by which whole
races will explain their dreams, never staying, when experience happens to
confirm it, to wonder that the correspondences are not more frequent than
they are. Where the arbitrary act was wrought, the isolated or conflicting
influences manifest, there deity or demon was working. So the passage from
the crude interpretation of his dreams by the barbarian to the formal
elaboration of the dream-oracle is obvious. It was only one of many modes
by which the gods were thought to hold converse with man, and by which
their will was divined. It was one phase of that many-sided belief in
power for good or evil inhering in everything, and which led man to see
omens in the common events of life, in births, in the objects any one met
in a journey or saw in the sky; to divine the future by numbers, by the
lines in the hand, by the song and flight of birds (lurking in the word
_augury_), by the entrails of sacrificed men and animals.[100] Sometimes
the god sends the message through a spiritual being, an angel (literally
“messenger”); sometimes he, himself, speaks in vision, but more often
through the symbolism of both familiar and unfamiliar things. To interpret
this is a serious science, and skill and shrewdness applied therein with
success were passports to high place and royal favour. In this we have the
familiar illustrations of Joseph and Daniel, and, indeed, we need not
travel beyond the books of the Old Testament for abundant and varied
examples of the importance attached to dreams and visions, and of the
place accorded to dreams,[101] an importance undiminished until we come to
the literature of the centuries just before Christ. For example, in the
Book of Jesus the Son of Sirac, we read--
“Vain and deceitful hopes befit the senseless man,
And dreams make fools rejoice,
Like one who grasps at a shadow and chases the wind,
Is he who puts trust in dreams.”[102]
In the belief that through dreams and oracles Yahweh made known his will,
the influence of older beliefs and their literature is apparent. Among the
Accadians, a pre-Semitic race in Babylonia, there existed a mass of
treatises on magic and divination by dreams and visions, and both from
this and from Egyptian sources, blended with survivals from their barbaric
past, the Hebrews largely drew.
In this, too, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Homer, painting the
vividness and agonising incompleteness of the passing visions, affirms
that dreams from Jove proceed, although sometimes to deceive men; Plato
assigns prophetic character to the images seen in them; Aristotle sees a
divination concerning some things in dreams which is not incredible; the
answer to oracles was sought in them, as when the worshipper slept in a
temple on the skin of a sacrificed ram, and learned his destiny through
the dream that came. The Stoics argued that if the gods love and care for
men and are all-knowing, they will tell their purposes to men in sleep.
Cicero attaches high importance to the faculty of interpreting them; their
phenomena, like those of oracles and predictions, should, he contends, be
explained just as the grammarians and the commentators explain the
poets.[103]
With the influence of these beliefs in the air, and with the
legend-visions of Scripture as authority, the divine origin of dreams
became a doctrine of the Christian Church. Tertullian says that “we
receive dreams from God, there being no man so foolish as never to have
known any dreams come true,” and in his _De Anima_ reference is made to a
host of writers of dream treatises. For the most part they are but names;
their treatises have perished, but enough remains for the perusal of the
curious regarding ancient rules of interpretation and the particular
significance of certain dreams. The current views of dreams in classic
antiquity are believed to be partly embodied in the ’Ονειροκριτικα’ of
Artemidorus of Ephesus, who flourished about the middle of the second
century, and who reduces dream interpretation to a body of elaborate
rules, while amongst Christian writers Synesius of Cyrene, who lived two
centuries later, holds a corresponding place.
Both classic and patristic writers supply copious details concerning the
classes into which dreams were divided, and which have some curious
correspondences among the Oriental nations, as well as in our dream-lore,
_e.g._, when Artemidorus says that he who dreams he hath lost a tooth
shall lose a friend, we may compare with this a quotation which Brand
gives from the _Sapho and Phao_ of Lily, a playwright of the time of
Elizabeth. “Dreams have their trueth. Dreams are but dotings, which come
either by things we see in the day or meates that we eat, and so the
common-sense preferring it to be the imaginative. ‘I dreamed,’ says
Ismena, ‘mine eyetooth was loose, and that I thrust it out with my
tongue.’ ‘It foretelleth,’ replies Mileta, ‘the loss of a friend; and I
ever thought thee so full of prattle that thou wouldst thrust out the best
friend with thy tatling.’”
It is, however, needless to quote from Artemidorus and others of their
kin. They do but furnish samples of the ingenuity applied to profitless
speculations on matters which were fundamental then, and around which the
mind played unchecked and unchallenged. Moreover, the subtle distinctions
made between dreams in former times were slowly effaced, or sank to their
proper level in the gossip of chap books--our European _kee-keé-wins_. But
the belief in the dream as having a serious meaning, and in the spectral
appearances in visions as real existences, remained as strong as in any
barbarian or pagan. In an atmosphere charged with the supernatural,
apparitions and the like were matters of course, the particular form of
the illusion to which the senses testified being in harmony with the ideas
of the age. The devil does not appear to Greek or Roman, but he sorely
troubled the saints, unless their nerves were, like Luther’s, strong
enough to overmaster him. Luther speaks of him as coming into his cell,
and making a great noise behind the stove, and of his walking in the
cloister above his cell at night; “but as I knew it was the devil,” he
says, “I paid no attention to him, and went to sleep.” Sceptics now and
again arose protesting against the current belief, but they were as a
voice crying in the desert. One Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fifteenth
century, a man born out of due time, says, “To this delusion not a few
great philosophers have given not a little credit, especially Democritus,
Aristotle, Sincsius, etc., so far building on examples of dreams, which
some accident hath made to be true, that thence they endeavour to persuade
men that there are no dreams but what are real.”
His words have not yet lost their purport. For the credulity of man, the
persistence with which he clings to the shadow of the supernatural after
having surrendered the substance, seem almost a constant quantity, varying
only in form. Unteachable by experience, fools still pay their guineas to
mediums to rap out inane messages from the departed, and send postage
stamps to the Astronomer Royal, asking him to “work the planets” for them,
and secure them luck in love and law-suits. Nor is there any cure for this
but in wise culture of the mind, wise correction, and wholesome control of
the emotions. “By faithfully intending the mind to the realities of
nature,” as Bacon has it, and by living and working among men in a
healthy, sympathetic way, exaggeration of a particular line of thought or
feeling is prevented, and the balance of the faculties best preserved.
For, adds Dr. Maudsley, in pregnant and well-chosen words, “there are not
two worlds--a world of nature and a world of human nature--standing over
against one another in a sort of antagonism, but one world of nature, in
the orderly evolution of which human nature has its subordinate part.
Delusions and hallucinations may be described as discordant notes in the
grand harmony. It should, then, be every man’s steadfast aim, as a part of
nature--his patient work--to cultivate such entire sincerity of relations
with it; so to think, feel, and act always in intimate unison with it; to
be so completely one with it in life, that when the summons comes to
surrender his mortal part to absorption into it, he does so, not
fearfully, as to an enemy who has vanquished him, but trustfully, as to a
mother who, when the day’s task is done, bids him lie down to sleep.”
INDEX.
Abipone, 15, 151, 156.
Abraham, 135.
Accadians, 134, 240.
Æsop, 96.
Agassiz, 208.
Agni, 74.
Agrippa, Cornelius, 243.
Ahriman, 54.
Alger, 208.
Algonquins, 40, 43, 46, 91, 99, 110, 125, 167, 184, 203, 211, 216.
Allah, 159.
Ancestors, sun and moon as, 19.
worship of, 110, 112, 214.
Ancient Stone Age, 8.
Animal, descent from, 99.
worship, 110.
Animals, transformation into, 81.
virtue in flesh of, 164.
souls in, 207.
Apollo, 52.
Arabian folk-tales, 196.
notion of soul, 202.
Araucanians, 43, 163.
Arnobius, 167.
Arnold, Matthew, 14, 227.
Art, primitive, 147.
Artemidorus, 241.
Arthur, King, 123.
Aryan epics, 71.
Aryan folk-tales, 70, 95.
languages, 67.
myths, 51, 76.
Aryans, primitive home of, 69.
Astrology, 33.
Australians, 20, 26, 30, 99, 103, 150, 153, 157, 165, 179, 198, 205.
Aztecs, 44, 199, 210.
Barbaric belief in dreams, 168-174.
belief in souls in brutes, etc., 207-213.
belief in virtue in lifeless things, 12, 160-168, 181.
confusion about names, 154-159.
cures for disease, 179.
dread of portrait-taking, 162.
language, 150.
notions of soul’s abode, 215-222.
theory of disease, 174, 182.
theory of a soul, 182-187.
theory of soul’s nature, 198-206.
Baring Gould, 28, 84.
Basutos, 184.
Beast-fables, 94, 98.
Beowulf, 52.
Berserkr, 87.
Bifröst, 33.
Bird, soul as, 210.
wind as, 43-45.
Body, soul apart from, 188.
soul as replica of, 205.
Bohemian folk-tale, 195.
Bonaparte, 64.
Brain of man and ape, 144.
Brand, 17, 166, 241.
Brazilian Indians, 153, 156, 175.
Breath, soul as, 187, 198 ff.
Brébeuf, 165.
Brinton, 45, 92, 101, 210.
Brutes, souls in, 207.
Bryant, 7.
Buckle, 3.
Buddha, 64.
Buddhist fables (_see_ Jâtakas).
Bunsen, 132.
Bushmen, 13, 20, 26.
Cæsar, 106.
Callaway, Bishop, 170.
Campbell, J. F., 193.
Cannibalism, 165.
Cardinal points, symbol of, 44.
Caribs, 167.
Carpenter, Dr., 88, 232.
Catlin, 162.
Charlemagne, 125.
Charles’s Wain, 30.
Charms, philosophy of, 164.
Chasuble, 167.
Chaucer, 28, 32.
Child and savage, 14.
Chimpanzee, brain of, 145.
Chinese myth, 16, 36.
Choctaws, 42, 184.
Christian heaven, 220.
religion, 231.
Cicero, 240.
Civilised theories of soul’s nature, 198, 203.
Clan-totems, 107, 109.
Cloud-serpent, 46.
Clouds as cows, 51.
Confession, 181.
Congo Negroes, 202.
Continuity, doctrine of, 228, 231.
Coral, 166.
Costa Ricans, 216, 234.
Counting, savage, 153.
Cox, Sir G. W., 37, 62, 75, 198.
Crest, totem as, 108.
Cronus, 35, 37.
Cross as wind symbol, 44.
_Custom and Myth_, 38.
Dakotas, 31, 46, 106, 175, 199, 213.
Dammaras, 151.
Darwin, 3, 230.
Dasent, 91, 121.
Dead, burial of food with, 212.
road of the, 32.
Death, savage notion of, 186.
Demons, 58, 178.
Dennys, 15.
Deodand, 15.
Devil, 53, 56, 60.
as disease-bringer, 176.
Disease, savage theory of, 89, 174 ff.
savage remedies for, 179.
Doctrine of signatures, 166.
Dorman, 42, 157, 209.
Dragons, battles with, 52.
Dreams as source of belief in soul, 183, 225.
Dreams, duality in, 183.
savage belief in reality of, 168-174.
omens from, 236-242.
Dyaks, 17, 25, 159, 171.
Dyaus, 36, 74.
Earth as source of heaven-theories, 219.
Earth-bearers, 40.
Echo, soul as, 185.
_Edda_, 15, 29, 33, 43, 52.
Effigy, burning in, 16.
Egg, world as, 38.
Ego, the, 232.
Egyptian folk-tale, 197.
Epics, Aryan, 71.
Epidemic delusions, 88.
Eskimos, 30, 91, 153, 163, 179, 199, 217, 237.
Esthonian myth, 39.
Euhêmeros, 66.
Eumenidês, 159.
Evolution, 144.
of mind, 5, 228.
Exile, Jewish, 134.
Exogamy, 104.
Eye-bright, 15, 166.
Fasting, 237.
Fijians, 171, 177, 184, 211.
Fingers in counting, 153.
Finnish myth, 16, 32, 38, 43, 45, 121, 176, 196, 219.
Finns, 159, 173.
Fire myths, 47.
Food, forbidden, 105.
Foster, Thomas, 63.
Frisian moon myth, 28.
Gaea, 35.
Galton, 151.
Gellert myth, 128.
Gender, origin of, 22.
_Gesta Romanorum_, 128.
Giant with no heart in his body, 192.
Gill, W. W., 20, 47, 177.
Gladstone, W. E., 7.
Gods, revelation from, through dreams, 239.
Goldziher, 62, 64, 135.
Greek myth, 33, 77.
notion of soul, 202.
Greenlanders, 27, 164, 171, 201, 212.
Grimm, 27, 30, 32, 55, 97, 178, 181, 201, 209, 210.
Grimm’s Law, 73.
Grote, 14.
Hades, 220.
Hall, Bishop, 18.
Heaven, 19.
imagery of, 221.
and earth, myths of, 34.
Hebrew myth, 33, 39, 64, 131-136.
notion of soul, 206.
Hell, 220.
Heraklês, 22, 31, 51, 63, 136.
Hêrê, 31.
Hiawatha, 158.
Hidatsa Indians, 235.
History, myth in, 114.
_Hitopadesa_, 129.
Holmes, 183.
Homer, 240.
Hottentot, 217.
Huc, Father, 181.
Hurricane, 199.
Huxley, 145, 228.
Icelandic moon myth, 28.
Iliad, 55, 64, 205.
Ilmarine, 39.
Im Thurn, 156, 171, 207.
Inanimate things, criminality of, 15.
sex in, 24.
souls in, 211.
Incas, 45.
_Indian Fairy Tales_, 191.
Indians, Columbian, 155.
Housatonic, 31.
North American, 13, 17, 21, 26, 30, 151, 156, 162, 164, 175, 199, 207,
212, 216, 219, 235, 237.
of Guiana, 156, 171.
Selish, 27.
Western, 46, 107.
Indra, 49, 53.
Iroquois, 156, 165, 167.
Isaac, 135.
Islam, 33.
Jack and Jill, 28.
Japanese myth, 40.
Jâtakas, 27, 96, 129, 192.
Jehovah, 159.
Johnson, Dr., 183.
Jonah, 136.
Kaffirs, 13, 164.
_Kalevala_, 38.
_Kalevipöeg_, 39.
Kane, Dr., 155.
Kasirs, 30.
Kenaima, 175.
Khasias moon myth, 27.
Kinship, primitive, 102.
Kirby, 196.
Kuhn, 41.
Lancashire folk-lore, 177, 204.
Lang, Andrew, 37, 166, 205.
Lang, Dr., 157.
Language, personification of, 24.
physical base of, 150.
primitive, 149.
Languages, savage, 23.
limitations of, 150.
Lapps, 156, 159, 201.
Leland, 44.
Lightning myths, 47.
Lithuanian, 32.
Living and not living, savage confusion between, 12, 160-168, 181.
Llewellyn myth, 128.
Lucretius, 169.
Luther, 242.
Lycanthropy, 83.
Lyell, 145.
Malays, 150.
Man, mental development of, 147, 228.
primitive interpretation of nature by, 10.
relation of, to nature, 4, 228.
savage and civilised, 144.
Manacicas, 20.
_Manes_, 212.
Maoris, 34.
Mapuches, 180.
Marriage, primitive, 103.
Maruts, 44, 53.
Matthews, Washington, 235.
Maudsley, Dr., 243.
Maui, sun-catcher, 21.
fire-bringer, 47.
M’Lennan, 102, 104.
Medicine-men, 92, 99, 237.
Melanesian, 166.
Men-beasts, 86.
Metamorphosis, 81.
Metempsychosis, 82.
Mexicans, 212.
Milky Way, 31, 222.
Mind, evolution of, 5, 228.
Mivart, 233.