Some Of The Most Ancient Languages Seem Bald And Incomplete, Too Rigid; They Need Intonation, As It Were, To Express Passion Or Changes Of Emotion, And When Written The Letters Are Too Far Apart To Indicate What Is Meant.

Not too far apart upon the page, but far apart in their sense, which has to be supplied as you supply the vowels.

In actual use such languages must have required much gesture and finger-sketching in the air. The letters of the Egyptians largely consist of animals and birds, which represent both sounds and ideas. Dreaming over the embers of his fire, the Cave-man saw pass before his mental vision all the circumstances of the chase, ending with the crash when the mammoth crushed into the pit, at which he would start and partially awake. Intentness of mind upon a pursuit causes an equivalent intentness of dream, and thus wild races believe their dreams to be real and substantial things, and not mere shadows of the night. To those who do not read or write much, even in our days, dreams are much more real than to those who are continuously exercising the imagination. If you use your imagination all day you will not fear it at night. Since I have been occupied with literature my dreams have lost all vividness and are less real than the shadows of trees, they do not deceive me even in my sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed to call up figures at will before my eyes, which stand out well defined and coloured to the very hue of their faces. If I see these or have disturbed visions during the night they do not affect me in the least. The less literary a people the more they believe in dreams; the disappearance of superstition is not due to the cultivation of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to the mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually puts figures and aerial shapes before the mental gaze that in time those that occur naturally are thought no more of than those conjured into existence by a book. It is in far-away country places, where people read very little, that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of fate. Their dreams are real.

The mammoth came through his cave before the embers of his fire - the sleeping savage could touch it with his flint-headed spear - there was the crash as it fell into the prepared pit; he awakes, the dying embers cast shadows on the walls, and in these he traces the shape of the vast creature hastening away. The passing spirit has puffed the charred brands into a second's flame, and thus shadowed itself in the hollow of the cavern.

Deeper than the excitement of the chase lies that inner consciousness which dwells upon and questions itself - the soul of the Cave-man pondered upon itself; the question came to him, as he crouched in the semi-darkness, over the fire which he had stirred, 'Will my form and aerial shadow live on after my death like that which passed but now? Shall I, too, be a living dream?' The reply was, 'Yes, I shall continue to be; I shall start forth from my burial-mound upon the chase in the shadow-land just as now I start forth from my cave.

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