[1] To this very day the idea is prevalent among savages and barbarians that the human forms appearing in our dreams are souls which temporarily leave the body, and that, therefore, the real man becomes liable for the deeds done to the dreamer by his dream appearance. So Imthurm, for example, found it in 1884 among the Indians in Guiana. III. The distinct idealism of Feuerbach is evident directly we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics. He does not wish to abolish religion by any means; he wants to perfect it. Philosophy itself will be absorbed in religion. "The periods of human progress are only distinguishable by religious changes. There is only a real historical progress where it enters the hearts of men. The heart is not a place for religion, so that it should be in the heart, it is the very being of religion." Religion is, according to Feuerbach, a matter of the feelings--the feelings of love between man and man which up to now sought its realization in the fantastic reflected image of the reality--in the interposition through one or more gods of the fantastic reflections of human qualities--but now by means of love between "ego" and "tu" finds itself directly and without any intermediary. According to Feuerbach love between the sexes is, if not the highest form, at least one of the highest forms, of the practice of his new religion. Now, feelings of affection between man and man, and particularly between members of the two sexes, have existed as long as mankind has. Love between the sexes has been cultivated especially during the last eighteen hundred years and has won a place which has made it, in this period, a compulsory motive for all poetry. The existing positive religions have limited themselves in this matter to the bestowal of complete consecration upon the State regulation of sexual love, and might completely disappear tomorrow without the least difference taking place in the matter of love and friendship. Thus the Christian religion in France was, as a matter of fact, so completely overthrown between the years 1793 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not re-introduce it without opposition and difficulty, without, in the interval, any desire for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense, making itself felt.