Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/176

 154 of remembrance seems mere mockery. I do not know any explanation simpler than the assumption that the person one has felt and seen was actually present. If by chance one knows that person to have been elsewhere, then the immediate inference is that he is double. Certain savages believe that men have four souls. One may, of course, offer objections to this interpretation; but the savage does not realize the difficulties that thrust themselves upon the reflecting mind. Observations of the beliefs of intellectually inferior persons of civilized races show that for most of them there is no contradiction sufficient to make them give up an explanation to which they have become attached. Durkheim alludes to other simpler and more adequate explanations of dreams, but these he does not himself advance.

In the life of young children are found indications of the possibility of the dream-origin of the idea of doubles. Preyer relates of his child, then in his fourth or fifth year, that "he sometimes cried out in the night, and imagined that a pig was going to bite him. He seemed to see the animal as if it were actually there, and he could not be convinced that it was not there even after his bed was brightly lighted up." In the Diary of a Father, published as an appendix to Sully's Studies of Childhood, we read of C., four years old:—"He evidently takes these dream-pictures for sensible realities, and when relating a dream insists that he has actually seen the circus-horses and fairies which appear to him when asleep." Yet he knows that he has spent the night in a room into which horses could not enter; but it does not seem to be one of the wishes of children to get rid of contradictions otherwise than by dismissing the thought of them. The non-civilized adult behaves similarly, and in this he differs simply in degree from ourselves. It is unnecessary to multiply