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Rh fantastic imagining, the human mind is under the strict determination of law.

If we try to develop this suggestion we shall find three lines of approach open to us. First, there is the beaten track, followed up to the present time by almost all investigators who have dealt with the psychology of the folk story. This leads to the view that the formation and development of the folk story is to be studied chiefly by an analysis of the character and conditions of certain individual human reactions. You begin with a certain physiological and mental structure; you envisage a certain set of conditions, all of which operate within the life history of the individual narrators, and the folk story is the natural outcome. No matter who are the individuals concerned, or what is the period, place, and manner of their life, the underlying physiological and mental structure remain constant. Hence an astonishing likeness is found in the folk stories of the most distantly scattered races of the earth, and the similarity is easily accounted for in terms of the identity of fundamental human reactions.

This view is, in one form or another, familiar enough. But it has lately received a new impetus from Freud's study of the dream. For when we are asleep and dreaming, then, it would seem, do we most of all have ourselves entirely to ourselves. The dream, that is, very definitely appears to be a fact of individual psychology. Yet the general mode both of the structure and of the motive of dreams bears, seemingly, a very constant character in different instances. We all dream alike more or less. Only in their details do our dreams differ, and follow the divergencies of individual experience. Whether as regards their origin, their general structure, or the place which they occupy in the mental life, all dreams are one, because, ultimately, the individual mechanism determining human responses remains constant.

The attempt has been made recently to take over