Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/463

Rh In one of the latter he himself figured, for when a disciple of his, Eulogius the rhetor of Carthage, once could not get to sleep for thinking of an obscure passage in Cicero's Rhetoric, that night Augustine came to him in a dream and explained it. But Augustine's tendency was toward the modern theory of dreams, and in this case he says it was certainly his image that appeared, not himself, who was far across the sea, neither knowing nor caring about the matter. As we survey the immense series of dream-stories of similar types in patristic, mediæval, and modern literature, we may find it difficult enough to decide which are truth and which are fiction. But along the course of these myriad narratives of human phantoms appearing in dreams to cheer or torment, to warn or inform, or to demand fulfilment of their own desires, the problem of dream-apparitions may be traced in progress of gradual determination, from the earlier conviction that a disembodied soul really comes into the presence of the sleeper, toward the later opinion that such a phantasm is produced in the dreamer's mind without the perception of any external objective figure.

The evidence of visions corresponds with the evidence of dreams in their bearing on primitive theories of the soul, and the two classes of phenomena substantiate and supplement one another. Even in healthy waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education. Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very senses. Thus it comes to pass that throughout the lower civilization men believe, with the most vivid and intense belief, in the objective reality of the human spectres which they see in sickness, exhaustion, or excitement. As will be hereafter noticed, one main reason of the practices of fasting, penance, narcotising by drugs, and