Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/215

Rh life. His body lies immovable, life and warmth remain with it, his breath comes and goes, his pulse throbs as in his waking hours, but he in the mean time has traversed leagues and leagues of forests, crossed broad rivers, scalped an enemy, or killed some savage wild beast. Upon the supposition of a dual soul, the mystery of his sleep is at once explicable. While one soul stays and watches over the body, the other soul has gone out to roam over the world at will.

This explanation of dreams seems to have received wide-spread recognition alike with the early civilized and savage races of men. The Chinese thought that the soul in dreams went out in a nightly ramble even to foreign lands. One day when the "spiritual man" of T'ih Kwalee, one of the gentry, was out roaming around, a wild beast found his body and ate it; so, when the spirit returned, it found only the skeleton, but fortunately near by was a beggar's corpse, black and lame; this he took as a substitute for his own body, and always afterward walked with a staff. The Japanese believe that, if a sleeper is wakened suddenly and violently, he will die, because his soul is then rambling at a distance, and can not return to the body in time before it is awakened. This soul is supposed to have form and color, and to be a small, round, black body, and its adventures, when in the disembodied state, form a standard subject for Japanese novels and imaginative literature. Pliny tells us that the soul of Hermotinus, one of the embodiments of Pythagoras, was in the habit of leaving his body and wandering into distant countries, whence it brought back numerous accounts of various things which could not have been obtained by any one but a person who was present. The body in the mean time was left apparently lifeless. At last his enemies burned the body, so that the soul on its return was, as it were, deprived of its sheath. St. Augustine tells the story of a man who visited another and expounded a certain passage in Plato which formerly he had refused to do, and afterward, when questioned why he had changed his mind, denied that he had, but admitted that in a dream he had expounded the passage. At the Temple of Isis, in Alexandria, an Egyptian priest, in the presence of Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry, drew a magical circle on the ground, decked out with the customary astrological signs, and then invoked from the body of Plotinus his own soul, so that he stood face to face with it. Goethe positively asserts that he