The element of dread undoubtedly comes into play early. The awe which we feel in the presence of death, or in passing in the dark through a churchyard, takes in the savage the form of terror. The behaviour of the ghost in dreams, its ability to do what men still in the flesh cannot do, quicken the belief in occult power, and the desire to propitiate it. Among the Lapps red-hot stones are cast behind the coffins of the dead, and their graves fenced round to prevent their return to earth. The articles placed in the grave as gifts for the dead become sacrifices laid on the altar to appease malignant spirits; the mound or tomb becomes a temple, and awe passes by easy degrees into worship. The prevalence in one form or another of ancestor-worship has, as remarked already, led Mr. Spencer to the conclusion that it is the rudimentary form of all religions; even sun, moon, volcano, river, etc., being feared and adored because they were believed to be the dwelling-places of ancestral ghosts. The facts are against this theory. It is to the larger, the more impressive phenomena of the natural world, the sun in noontide strength and splendour, the lightning and the thunder, that we must look for the primary causes which awakened the fear, the wonder, and the adoration in which lie the germs of the highest religions. Such causes are not only sufficient, but more operative on the undeveloped intelligence than the belief in ancestral spirits of the mountain and the sea, which involves a more complex mental action.[90] The one is contributory, but subordinate, to the other. It is, as M. Réville remarks, “the phenomena of nature regarded as animated and conscious that wake and stimulate the religious sentiments, and become the objects of the adoration of man.... If nature-worship, with the animism that it engenders,[91] shapes the first law to which nascent religion submits in the human race, anthropomorphism furnishes the second, disengaging itself ever more and more completely from the zoomorphism which generally serves as an intermediary. This is so everywhere.”[92]
§ XI.
BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL’S DWELLING-PLACE.
The existence of the ghost-soul or other self being unquestioned, the inquiry follows, where does it dwell? Like the trolls of Norse myth, who burst at sunrise, the flitting spirit vanishes in the light and comes with the darkness; but what places does it haunt when the quiet of the night is unbroken by its intrusion, and where are they?
The answers to these are as varied as the vagaries of rude imagination permit. We must not expect to find any theories of the soul’s prolonged after-existence among races who have but a dim remembrance of yesterday, and but a hazy conception of a to-morrow. Neither, among such, any theories of the soul abiding in a place of reward or punishment, as the result of things done in the body. Speaking of the heaven of the Red man, Dr. Brinton remarks that “nowhere was any well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and punished in the next world. No contrast is discoverable between a place of torment and a realm of joy; at the worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the niggard.” Ideas of a devil and a hell are altogether absent from the barbaric mind, since it is obvious that any theory of retribution could arise only when man’s moral nature had so developed as to awaken questions about the government of the universe, and to call another world into existence to redress the wrongs and balance the injustices of this. His earliest queries were concerned with the whereabouts of the soul more than with its destiny, and it was, and still is, among the lower races, thought of as haunting its old abode or the burial-place of its body, and as acting very much as it had acted when in the flesh. The shade of the Algonquin hunter chases the spirits of the beaver and the elk with the spirits of his bow and arrow, and stalks on the spirits of his snow-shoes over the spirit of the snow. Among the Costa Ricans the spirits of the dead are supposed to remain near their bodies for a year, and the explorer Swan relates that when he was with the North-Western Indians he was not allowed to attend a funeral, lest he offended the spirits hovering round; whilst the Indians of North America often destroy or abandon the dwellings of the dead, the object being to prevent the ghost from returning, or to leave it free so to do. But it is needless to multiply illustrations of a belief which has been persistent in the human mind from the dawn of speculation about the future of the soul to the present day. The barbarians who think that the spirits of the dead move and have their being near the living, join them on their journeys, and sit down, unseen visitants, at their feasts (to be driven off, as among the Eskimos, by blowing the breath), are one with the multitudes of folks in Europe and America who, sorrowing over their dead, think of them as ministering with unfelt hands, and as keenly interested in their concerns.
“We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.”
The Ojibway, who detects their tiny voices in the insect’s hum, and thinks of them as sheltering themselves from the rain by thousands in a flower, as sporting by myriads on a sunbeam, is one with the Schoolmen who speculated on the number of angels that could dance on a needle’s point, and with Milton in his poetic rendering of the belief of his time, that
“Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.”
The Hottentot who avoids a dead man’s hut lest the ghost be within, is one with the believers in haunted houses, in banshees, wraiths, and spectres. Such as he should not be excluded as “corresponding members” of the Society for Psychical Research in the invitations[93] which its committee issues to folks who have seen apparitions, and slept, or tried to sleep, in the dreaded chamber of some moated hall of mystery.
If we look in vain for any consistency of idea or logical relation in barbaric notions, our wonder ceases at the absence of these when we note the conflicting conceptions entertained among intelligent people. But the underlying thought is identical. The examples given in a foregoing section on the belief in the passage of the soul into other human bodies, into animals and stones, strengthened as this is by the likeness in mind and body between children and dead relatives, by the human expression noted on many a brute, by the human shape of many a stone, show how the theory of the soul as nigh at hand finds many-sided support. In this belief, too, lie the germs of theories of successive transmigrations elaborated in the faiths of advanced races, when the defects of body and character were explained as the effects of sin committed in a former existence.
Next in order of conception appears to be that of the soul as living an independent existence, an improved edition of the present, in an under or upper world, into which the dead pass without distinction of caste or worth.
The things dreamed about respecting the land of spirits and their occupations are woven of the materials of daily life. Whether to the sleeping barbarian in his wigwam, or to the seer banished in Patmos; whether to the Indian travelling in his dreams to the happy hunting-ground, or to the apostle caught up in trance into paradise; earth, and earth alone, supplies the materials out of which man everywhere has shaped his heaven. Her dinted and furrowed surface; valleys and mountain-tops; islands sleeping in summer seas, or fretted by winter storms; cities walled and battlemented; glories of sunrise and sunset; gave variety enough for play of the cherished hopes and imaginings of men. If we collect any group of barbaric fancies, we find, speaking broadly, that a large proportion have pictured the home of souls as in the west, towards the land of the setting sun. Seen from many a standpoint to sink beneath river, lake, or ocean, which for untutored man enclosed his world, it led to the myth of waters of death dividing earth from heaven, which the soul, often at perilous risk, must cross. Such was the Ginnunga-gap of the Vikings; the nine seas and a half across which travellers to Manala, the under-world of the Finns, must voyage; the great water of the Red Indians; the Vaitarani of the Brahmans; the Stygian stream of the Greeks; and the Jordan of the Christians, that flows between us and the Celestial City, “where the surges cease to roll.” The sinking of the sun below the horizon obviously led to belief in an under-world, whither the ghosts went. Barbaric notions are full of this, and the lower culture out of which their beliefs arose is evidenced in the Orcus of the Romans, the Hades of the Greeks, the Helheim of the Norsemen, the Sheol of the Hebrews, and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the solar features of which last are clearly traceable in their doctrine. Among the Hebrews, Sheol (translated, curiously enough, thirty-one times as “grave,” and thirty-one times as “hell,” in our Authorised Version) was a vast cavernous space in which the shades of good and bad alike wandered—“the small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master.” It is akin in character to the Greek Hades, where they “wander mid shadows and shade, and wail by impassable streams.” As ideas of a Divine rule of the world grew, its manifestations in justice were looked for, and the mystery of iniquity, the wicked “flourishing like a green bay tree,” led to the conception of a future state, in which Lazarus and Dives would change places. Sheol thus became, on the one hand, a land of delight and repose for the faithful, and, on the other hand, one of punishment for the wicked.
Persian, and still older, influences had largely leavened Hebrew conceptions, and local conditions in Judea added pungent elements. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, “the place where lie the corpses of those who have sinned against Jehovah, where their worm shall not die, neither their fire be quenched;” the dreary volcanic region around the Dead Sea, with its legend of doomed cities, supplied their imagery of hell with its lake of fire and brimstone. And, as the belief travelled westward, it fell into congenial soil. The sulphurous stench around Lacus Avernus, the smoke of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, wreathed themselves round the hell of Christianity and the under-world of barbaric myth; and from Talmudic writer to classic poet, to Dante and to Milton, the imagination exhausted the material of the horrible to describe the several tortures of the damned. The hell of our northern forefathers remained below the flat earth, but the cold, misty Niflheim melted away before the fiery perdition of Christian dogma. And, in the region bordering thereon, the limbus patrum, the limbus infantum, etc., we have the survival of belief in separate hells characteristic of the Oriental religions, and of the sub-divisions of the lower world in more rudimentary religions.
Beyond the narrow horizon which bounded the world of the ancients, lay the imaginary land of the immortals, the Blessed, the Happy, the Fortunate Isles. But as that horizon enlarged, the Elysian Fields and Banquet Halls were transferred to an upper sphere. In the wonder aroused by the firmament above, with its solid-looking vault across which sun, stars, and clouds traversed; in the place it plays in dreams of barbarian and patriarch, when the sleeper is carried thither; in its brightness of noonday glory as contrasted with the dark sun-set under-world, we may find some of the materials of which the theory of an upper world, a heaven (“the heaved”) is made up. There the barbarian places his paradise to which the rainbow and the Milky Way are roads; there he meets his kindred, and lives where cold, disease, and age are not, but everlasting summer and summer fruits. There, too, for the conceptions of advanced races are drawn from the same sources, the civilised peoples of Europe and America have placed their heaven. And, save in refinement of detail incident to intellectual growth, there is nothing to choose between the earlier and the later; the same gross delights, the same earth-born ideas are there, whether we enter the Norseman’s Valhalla, the Moslem’s Paradise, or the Christian’s New Jerusalem.
§ XII.
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING.
It would exceed the limits and purport of this book to follow the extension of the belief in spirits to its extreme range; in other words, to belief in controlling spirits in inanimate objects, which were advanced pari passu with man’s advancing conceptions to place and rank as the higher gods of polytheism. Such belief, as already indicated, is the outcome of that primitive philosophy which invests the elements above and the earth beneath with departmental deities, until, through successive stages of dualism, the idea of a Supreme Deity is reached, and the approach is thus made towards a conception of the unity and unvarying order of nature. Deferring reference to the part played by dreams as media of communication between heaven and earth, and as warnings of coming events, let us summarise the evidence which has been gathered, and ask whether it warrants the conclusions drawn from it in the present work.
It has been shown that races have existed, and exist still, at so low a level that their scanty stock of words has to be supplemented by gestures, rendering converse in the dark next to impossible. Such people are bewildered by any effort to count beyond their fingers; they have no idea of the relation of things, or of their differences; they have no power of generalisation by which to merge the accidental in the essential. They believe that their names and likenesses are integral parts of themselves, and that they can be bewitched or harmed through them at the hands of any one who knows the one or has obtained the other. As an important result of their confusion between the objective and the subjective, we find a vivid and remarkable belief in the reality of their dreams. The events which make up these are explained only on the theory that if the body did not move from its sleeping place, something related to it did, and that the people, both living and dead, who appeared in dream and vision, did in very presence come. The puzzle is solved by the theory of a second self which can leave the body and return to it. For the savage knows nothing of mind. The belief in this other self is strengthened (possibly more or less created) by its appearance in shadow or reflection, in mocking echo, in various diseases, especially fits, when the sufferer is torn by an indwelling foe, and writhes as if in his merciless grasp. The belief in such a ghost-soul, as to the form and ethereal nature of which all kinds of theories are started, is extended to animals and lifeless things, since like evidence of its existence is supplied by them. The fire that destroys his hut, the wind that blows it down, the lightning that darts from the clouds and strikes his fellow-man dead beside him, the rain-storm that floods his fields, the swollen river that sweeps away his store of food—these and every other force manifest in nature add their weight to the inferences which rude man has drawn. The phenomena which have accounted for the vigour of life and the prostration of disease account for the motion of things in heaven above and the earth beneath, and the barbaric mind thus enlarges its belief in a twofold existence in man to a far-reaching doctrine of spirits everywhere. Step by step, from ghost-soul flitting round the wigwam to the great spirits indwelling in the powers of nature, the belief in supernatural beings with physical qualities arises, until the moral element comes in, and they appear as good and evil gods contending for the mastery of the universe. Passing by details as to the whereabouts of the other self and its doings and destiny in the other world which the dream involves, and following the order of ideas on scientific lines, two queries arise:—
1. Does the evidence before us suffice to warrant the conclusions drawn from it as to the serious and permanent part which dreams have played in the origin and growth of primitive belief in spirits; in short, of belief in supernatural agencies from past to present times? In this place the answer is brief. Of course the antecedent conditions of man’s developed emotional nature, and of the universe of great and small, which is the field of its exercise, are taken for granted.
The general animistic interpretation which man gives to phenomena at the outset expressed itself in the particular conceptions of souls everywhere, of which dreams and such-like things supplied the raw material. If they did not, what did? Denying this, we must fall back on a theory of intuition or on revelation. As to the former, it begs the whole question; as to the latter, can that which is itself the subject of periodical revision be an infallible authority on anything?
If dreams, apparitions, shadows, and the like, are sufficing causes, then, in obedience to the Law of Parsimony (as it is termed in logic), we need not invoke the play of higher causes when lower ones are found competent to account for the effects. If it seems to some that the base is too narrow, the foundation too weak for the superstructure, and that our metaphysics and our beliefs regarding the invisible rest upon something wider and stronger than the illusions of a remote savage ancestry, the facts of man’s history may be adduced as witness to his continuous passage into truth through illusions; to the vast revolutions and readjustments made in his correction of the first impressions of the senses. There is not a belief of the past, from the notions of savages about their dreams and ghost-world to those of more advanced races about their spirit-realms and its occupants, to which this does not apply. In the more delicate observations of the astronomer he must, when estimating the position of any celestial body, take into account its apparent displacement through the refractive properties of the atmosphere, and must also allow for defects of perception in himself due to what is called “personal equation.” And in ascertaining our place in the scale of being, as well as in seeking for the grounds of belief concerning our own nature, we have to take into account the refracting media of dense ignorance and prejudice through which these beliefs have come, and to allow for the confirming error due to personal equation—fond desire. The result will be the vanishing of illusions involving momentous changes in psychology, ethics, and theology. Instead of groping among mental phenomena for explanations of themselves, they will be analysed by the methods already indicated. Instead of resting the authority for moral injunctions on innate ideas of right and wrong, and on inspired statutes and standards, it will rest on the accredited, because verifiable, experience of man. Instead of finding incentives to, or restraints on, conduct by operating on men’s hope of future reward, or fear of hell as “hangman’s whip to keep the wretch in order,” they will be supplied by an ever-widening sense of duty, quickened by love and loyalty to a supreme order, in obedience to which the ultimate happiness of humanity in the life that is will be secured.
In this, and not in theories of an hereafter whose origin and persistence are explained, will man find his satisfaction, and the springs of motive to whatever is ennobling, lovely, and of good report. With the poet, who, laying bare the sources of the unrest of his time, has led us to the secret of its peace, he will ask—
“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done,
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes—
That we should feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this,
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?”[94]
2. Does the theory of evolution in its application to the development of the spiritual nature of man, and to the origin and growth of ideas, find any breach of continuity? In its inclusion of him as a part of nature, in accounting for his derivation from pre-human ancestry by a process of natural selection, and in its proofs of his unbroken development from the embryo to adult life, it embraces the growth and development of mind and all that mind connotes. In the words of Professor Huxley, “As there is an anatomy of the body, so there is an anatomy of the mind; the psychologist dissects mental phenomena into elementary states of consciousness, as the anatomist resolves limbs into tissues, and tissues into cells. The one traces the development of complex organs from simple rudiments; the other follows the building up of complex conceptions out of simpler constituents of thought. As the physiologist inquires into the way in which the so-called ‘functions’ of the body are performed, so the psychologist studies the so-called ‘faculties’ of the mind. Even a cursory attention to the ways and works of the lower animals suggests a comparative anatomy and physiology of the mind; and the doctrine of evolution presses for application as much in the one field as in the other.”[95]
Any coherent explanation of the operations of nature was impossible while man had no conception or knowledge of the interplay of its several parts. Now, by the doctrine of continuity, not only are present changes referred to unvarying causes, but the past is interpreted by the processes going on under our eyes. We can as easily calculate eclipses backward as forward; we can learn in present formations of the earth’s crust the history of the deposition of the most ancient strata; we read in a rounded granite pebble the story of epochs, the fire that fused its organic or inorganic particles, the water that rubbed and rolled it; we reconstruct from a few bones the ancestry of obscure forms, and find in the fragments the missing links that connect species now so varied. And the like method is applied to man in his tout ensemble. His development is not arbitrary; what he is is the expansion of germs of what he was.
Till these latter days he has, on the warrant of legends now of worth only as witnesses to his crude ideas, presumed on an isolated place in creation, and excepted his race from an inquiry made concerning every creature beneath him. The pride of birth has hindered his admission of lineal connection between the beliefs of cultured races and the beliefs of savages, and pseudo-scientific writers still confuse issues by assuming distinctions between races to whom spiritual truths have been revealed and races from whom these truths have been withheld. But the only tenable distinction to be drawn nowadays is between the scientific and pre-scientific age in the history of any given race.
In these times, when many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased, we forget how recent are the tremendous changes wrought by the science that—
“Reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon.”
Dulled by familiarity, we forget how operative these changes are upon opinions which have been—save now and again by voices speedily silenced—unquestioned during centuries. It is, in truth, another world to that in which our forefathers lived. Even in science itself the revolution wrought by discoveries within the last fifty years is enormous. Our old standard authorities, especially in astronomy and geology, are now of value only as historical indices to the progress of those sciences, while in the domain of life itself the distinctions between plant and animal, assumed under the terms Botany and Zoology, are effaced and made one under the term Biology. Sir James Paget, in a profoundly interesting address on Science and Theology, has pointed out that it was once thought profane to speak of life as in any kind of relation or alliance with chemical affinities manifest in lifeless matter; now, the correlation of all the forces of matter is a doctrine which investigation more and more confirms. It was believed—many believe it still—that an impassable chasm separates the inorganic from the organic, the latter being attained only through operations of a “vital force” external to matter. That chasm is imaginary. Even the supposed difference between plants and animals in the existence in the latter of a stomach by which to digest and change nutritive substances, vanishes before the experiments on carnivorous plants. And not only do the observations of Mr. Darwin go far to show the existence of a nervous system in plants, but examination of crystals shows that a “truly elemental pathology must be studied in them after mechanical injuries or other disturbing forces.” And is man, “the roof and crown of things,” to witness to diversity amidst this unity?
If we hesitate to believe that our metaphysics have been evolved from savage philosophy, that our accepted opinions concerning man’s nature and destiny are but the improved and purified speculations of the past, we must remember what long years had elapsed before the spirit of science arose and breathed its air of freedom on the human mind. The Christian religion wrought no change in the attitude of man towards the natural world; it remained as full of mystery and miracle to the pagan after his conversion as before it. When that religion was planted in foreign soil it had, as the condition of its thriving, to be nourished by the alien juices. It had to take into itself what it found there, and it found very much in common. Although it displaced and degraded the Dii majores of other faiths, it had its own elaborated order of principalities and powers; it had as real a belief in demons and goblins as any pagan; and it was, therefore, simply a question of baptizing and rechristening the ghost-world of heathendom, substituting angels for swan-maidens and elves, devils for demons, and retaining unchanged the army of evil agencies, who as witches and wraiths swarmed in the night and wrought havoc on soul and body.
The doctrine of continuity admits no exceptions; it has no “favoured 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.”