ave lived an eventful life, when his body was, in fact,
quiescent and unconscious. Memories of scenes and activities in former
days, and the inherited memories of scenes witnessed and actions
performed by ancestors, are blended in strange confusion by broken and
inverted sequences. Now and then the dream-scenes are enacted in real
life, and the infrequent coincidence or apparent verification makes deep
impression on the mind, while unfulfilled dreams are forgotten. Thus the
dreams of sleepers are attributed to their immaterial duplicates their
spirits. In many diseases, also, the mind seems to wander, to see sights
and to hear sounds, and to have many wonderful experiences, while the
body itself is apparently unconscious. Sometimes, on restored health,
the person may recall these wonderful experiences, and during their
occurrence the subject talks to unseen persons, and seems to have
replies, and to act, to those who witness, in such a manner that a
second self--a spirit independent of the body--is suggested. When
disease amounts to long-continued insanity all of these effects are
greatly exaggerated, and make a deep impression upon all who witness the
phenomena. Thus the hallucinations of fever-racked brains, and mad
minds, are attributed to spirits.

The same conditions of apparent severance of mind and body witnessed in
dreams and hallucinations are often produced artificially in the
practice of _ecstasism_. In the vicissitudes of savage life, while
little or no provision is made for the future, there are times when the
savage resorts to almost anything at hand as a means of subsistence, and
thus all plants and all parts of plants, seed, fruit, flowers, leaves,
bark, roots--anything in times of extreme want--may be used as food. But
experience soon teaches the various effects upon the human system which
are produced by the several vegetable substances with which he meets,
and thus the effect of narcotics is early discovered, and the savage in
the practice of his religion oftentimes resorts to these native drugs
for the purpose of producing an ecstatic state under which divination
may be performed. The practice of ecstasism is universal in the lower
stages of culture. In times of great anxiety, every savage and barbarian
seeks to know of the future. Through all the earlier generations of
mankind, ecstasism has been practiced, and civilized man has thus an
inherited appetite for narcotics, to which the enormous propensi