Myths and Dreams

MYTHS AND DREAMS
BY EDWARD CLODD AUTHOR OF ‘THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD,’ ‘THE STORY OF CREATION,’ ETC.
SECOND EDITION, REVISED
London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1891
TO RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A., AUTHOR OF ‘THE SUN,’ ‘OTHER WORLDS,’ ETC., EDITOR OF ‘KNOWLEDGE.’
My dear Proctor—The best gifts of life are its friendships, and to you, with whom friendship has ripened into fellowship, and under whose editorial wing some of the chapters of this book had temporary shelter, I inscribe them in their enlarged and independent form.
Yours sincerely, EDWARD CLODD.

The object of this book is to present in compendious form the evidence which myths and dreams supply as to primitive man’s interpretation of his own nature and of the external world, and more especially to indicate how such evidence carries within itself the history of the origin and growth of beliefs in the supernatural.
The examples are selected chiefly from barbaric races, as furnishing the nearest correspondences to the working of the mind in what may be called its “eocene” stage, but examples are also cited from civilised races, as witnessing to that continuity of ideas which is obscured by familiarity or ignored by prejudice.
Had more illustrations been drawn from sources alike prolific, the evidence would have been swollen to undue dimensions without increasing its significance; as it is, repetition has been found needful here and there, under the difficulty of entirely detaching the arguments advanced in the two parts of this work.
Man’s development, physical and psychical, has been fully treated by Mr. Herbert Spencer, Dr. Tylor, and other authorities, to whom students of the subject are permanent debtors, but that subject is so many-sided, so far-reaching, whether in retrospect or prospect, that its subdivision is of advantage so long as we do not permit our sense of inter-relation to be dulled thereby.