g you to think a moment. Recollect your own dreams during
childhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child.
Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult it
must be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or
realities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes he
grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions. But,
moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children's dreams are wont
to be, of a painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always
painful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under the
influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. And
so, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he
will have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific
kind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a
shudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped out
upon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow and
unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten--but let us draw a
veil before the larder of a savage--his chin is pinned down on his chest,
a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himself
again at that cavern's mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him:
and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe.
It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at
home all the while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the
contrary. He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods. When
we remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no better
explanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and wandered
free, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory. Now, I submit that in
these simple facts we have a group of "true causes" which are the roots
of all the superstitions of the world.

And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I shall
answer, that I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to eliminate
and get rid of that which is material, animal, and base; in order that
that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct and clear, in its
divine and eternal beauty.

To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my hypothesis,
let me give you an example--fictitious, it is true, but probable fact
nevertheless; because it is patched up of many fragments of act