omena would revive the memory of angelic and saintly forms,
of which men were so profoundly conscious in times of religious
excitement, and would be regarded as their external signs, while they
would at the same time stimulate the appearance of such angelic
visions. Ultimately this would lead to the vast drama of celestial
hallucinations described for us in the accounts of many ecstatic
visions. They do not only occur in modern religions, but in those of the
old heathen, and in the rude and unformed beliefs of savages. The
ethnography of the most savage peoples of our time teaches us that the
origin of very many myths is to be found in normal and abnormal
hallucinations, and in the luminous visions which conform to their
mental conditions. Persons subject to nervous affections, from simple
epilepsy to madness and idiocy, were and still are supposed to be
inspired, and endowed with the power of prophesying and working
miracles; they are also venerated for relating the strange visions
presented to them in the crisis of their disorder. Africa, barbarous
Asia, America, Oceania, and the ignorant and superstitious people in
Europe itself, abound with such facts; they have occurred and are likely
to recur in civilized peoples of all times, including our own, as we
know only too well.

We have thus reduced the primitive origin of myth, of dreams, of all
illusions, of normal and abnormal hallucinations, to one unique fact and
genesis, to a fundamental principle; that is, to the primitive and
innate entification of the phenomenon, to whatever sensation it may be
referred. This fact is not exclusively human in its simple expression
and genesis, since it occurs in the lower animals; evidently in those
which are nearest to man, and by the necessary logic of induction in
all others, according to their sensations and modes of perception. In
the vast historic drama of opinions, beliefs, religions, mythical and
mytho-scientific theories which are developed in all peoples; and again,
in the infinite variety of dreams, illusions, mystic and nervous
hallucinations, all depend on the primitive and unique fact which is
also common to the animal kingdom, and identical with it; in man this is
also the condition of science and knowledge. I think that this
conclusion is not unworthy of the consideration of wise men and honest
critics, and that it will contribute to establish the definitive unity
of the general science of psychology, considered i