agricultural life, corresponds to early man who was mainly a hunter and often a nomad. Under the conditions of civilisation the peasant is fed regularly and leads a peaceful, stolid, laborious, and equable life, which is altogether unfavourable to psychic activity of any kind, awake or asleep. The savage man, now and ever, as a hunter and fighter, leads a life of comparative idleness, broken by spurts of violent activity; sometimes he can gorge himself with food, sometimes he is on the verge of starvation. He lives under conditions that are more favourable to the psychic side of life, awake or asleep, than is the case with the peasant of civilisation. Moreover, it must be remembered that all the peoples whom we may fairly regard as in some degree resembling early man possess a specialised caste of exceptional men who artificially cultivate their psychic activities, and thereby exert great influence on their fellows. These are termed, after their very typical representatives in some Siberian tribes, _shamans_, and combine the functions of priests and sorcerers and medicine men. It is nearly everywhere found that the shaman--who is often, it would appear, at the outset a somewhat abnormal person--cultivates solitude, fasting, and all manner of ascetic practices, thereby acquiring an unusual aptitude to dream, to see visions, to experience hallucinations, and, it may well be, to acquire abnormally clairvoyant powers. The shamans of the Andamanese are called by a word signifying dreamer, and in various parts of the world the shaman finds the first sign of his vocation in a dream. The evocation of dreams is often the chief end of the shaman's abnormal method of life. Thus, among the Salish Indians of British Columbia, dreams are the proper mode of communication with guardian spirits, and 'prolonged fasts, bathings, forced vomitings, and other exhausting bodily exercises are the means adopted for inducing the mystic dreams and visions.'[254] When we witness the phenomena of Shamanism in all parts of the world it is difficult to dispute the statement of Lucretius that the gods first appeared to men in dreams. This may be said to be literally true; even to-day it often happens that the savage's totem, who is practically his tutelary deity, first appears to him in a dream.[255] An influence which seems likely to have been so persistent may well have had a large plastic power in moulding the myths and legends which everywhere embody the religious impulses of men. This idea was long ago suggested by Hobbes. 'From this ignorance of how to distinguish dreams and other strong Fancies,' he wrote, 'from Vision and Sense, did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyrs, Fauns, Nymphs, and the like.'[256]