Dreams also have played a considerable rôle in the genesis of superstitions, as Epicurus and Lucretius remarked, and the labours of Messrs. Tylor and Spencer have proved. Primitive language supplies no means of saying, “I dreamt that I saw”; one must say simply, “I saw.” Well, in the dreams which the savage himself can scarcely distinguish from reality, he sees nothing but a perpetual series of metamorphoses, of the transformation of men into ferocious beasts, and of ferocious beasts into men; he dreams that he picks up a stone, and that it comes to life in his hand; he looks out upon a motionless lake, and it becomes suddenly a crawling mass of crocodiles and of serpents.[29] How can Mr. Spencer maintain, after that, that primitive man can distinguish with some degree of certainty the animate from the inanimate? Not only during dreams, but during wakefulness, everything suggests to primitive man the notion of changes of substance and magic metamorphoses. Eggs, which are inanimate, change into birds or insects; dead flesh becomes living worms; an effigy, under the influence of memory, seems to live again and to respire.[30] [29] Spencer’s _Sociology_. [30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move. I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas, which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind. A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive; everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic power. [Sidenote: Primitive man humanizes nature.]