To the savage, all nature testifies to the presence of the mysterious power which is behind its forms and motions. He sees the Divine everywhere. But from this multitude of impressions which excited him to religious thought we may separate a limited number as beyond others potent and universal. These are special stimuli to the religious emotions. They are five in number:
1. Dreaming and allied conditions.
2. The apprehension of Life and Death, from which arises the notion of the Soul.
3. The perception of Light and Darkness.
4. The observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions of Force.
5. The impression of Vastness.
1. A line of Lucretius asserts that “the dreams of men peopled the heaven with gods.” We have a right to reply that if dreams alone give us the gods, why are they absent from the lives of dogs, who are vivid dreamers?
Certain it is, however, that among all savage tribes dreams are regarded as a part of the experience of life. To primitive man, they are real: he sees and hears in them as he does in his waking hours; he does not distinguish between the subjective creation of his brain cells and objective existence.
In what they differ from daily life, they are divine. They reveal the future and summon the absent. The Kamschatkans, we are told, gather together every morning to narrate their dreams and to guess at their interpretation. Of the Eskimos it is stated that their daily lives “are to a great extent guided by their dreams.” The Bororo of Brazil take a dream so literally that a whole village will decamp and seek a distant site, if one dreams of the approach of an enemy.[55]
The physiological character of dreams easily explains the superstitious attention they have received in all ages and nations. The absence of external impressions during sleep favours the rise of unconscious mental action into consciousness. In them memory is often more active than while waking; our personality seems doubled, because it has no longer the will to react against the throngs of varied impressions which arise. The emotions in sleep are excitable, and both fear and joy are often more intense than when awake. Add to this that many persons, especially those of nervous temperament, are subject to peculiarly vivid illusions during the moments between waking and sleeping, which seem to belong as much to the former as to the latter conditions,[56] and we have reasons enough for the part they play in primitive religions.