Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/34

 22 Presidential Address.

value of dreams on this abstract reasoning. These ideas are the same among savages in all parts of the world. In Africa, dreams are supposed to convey messages from ancestors, in Madagascar from good spirits, and so forth. In religion, the prophetic dream is of constant occurrence. A king of the Malayan Archipelago saw the prophet of God in a dream, who told him that on the morrow a ship would arrive at his coast, and enjoined him to comply with the directions of the men who should land from it ; and so it happened. The authors assert that the data furnished by ethnology as to the mental condition of people with regard to dreams, do not differ much from those furnished by infantile psychology as to the beliefs of children with regard to dreams, before they are brought under the influence of education. This observation appears to us to be very sound, and goes far to cover the whole ground of the ques- tion under consideration. If a child observes the mystery of death, if a child speculates on the origin of things, he arrives at much the same conclusions as uncivilised man arrives at in the same circumstances. The child forms for himself the same sort of fantastic theories, rejoices (as Mr. Frazer puts it) in the play of " make-believe," and even establishes a sort of ethic — you ought to do or to be so- and-so, and I qught to do or to be so-and-so. Professor Tylor puts the savage theory of dreams very clearly when he says, "When the sleeper awakes from a dream, he believes he has really somehow been away or that other people have come to him. As it is well known by experience that men's bodies do not go on these excursions, the natural explanation is that every man's living self or soul is its phantom or image, which can go out of his body and see and be itself seen in dreams." We shall look forward with interest to the promised work of Messrs. Vaschide and Pieron on the psychology of the dream in the psycho-social life of savages.

Meanwhile, do not these considerations largely dispose of