and ideas to particular bodily movements and facial expressions. In a similar manner, he pointed out that bitter tastes and bitter thoughts tend to produce the same physical expression.[1] He also argued that the character of a man's looks—his fixed or dreamy eyes, his lively or stiff movements—correspond to real psychic characters. If this is so we have a physiological, almost anatomical, basis for symbolism. Cleland,[2] again, in an essay "On the Element of Symbolic Correlation in Expression," argued that the key to a great part of expression is the correlation of movements and positions with ideas, so that there are, for instance, a host of associations in the human mind by which "upward" represents the good, the great, and the living, while "downward" represents the evil and the dead. Such associations are so fundamental that they are found even in animals, whose gestures are, as Féré[3] remarked, often metaphorical, so that a cat, for instance, will shake its paw, as if in contact with water, after any disagreeable experiences.
The symbolism that to-day interpenetrates our language, and indeed our life generally, has mostly been inherited by us, with the traditions of civilization, from an antiquity so primitive that we usually fail to interpret it. The rare additions we make to it in our ordinary normal life are for the most part deliberately conscious. But so soon as we fall below, or rise above, that ordinary normal level—to insanity and hallucination, to childhood, to savagery, to folk-lore and legend, to poetry and religion—we are at once plunged into a sea of symbolism.[4] There is even a normal sphere in which symbolism has free scope and that is in the world of dreams.
Oneiromancy, the symbolical interpretation of dreams, more especially as a method of divining the future, is a wide-spread art in early stages of culture. The discerning of dreams is represented in the old testament as a very serious and anxious matter (as in regard to Pharoah's dream of the fat and lean cattle), and, nearer to our time, the dreams of great heroes, especially Charlemagne, are represented as highly important events in the medieval European epics. Little manuals on the interpretation of dreams have always been much valued by the uncultured classes, and among our current popular sayings there are many dicta concerning the significance, or the good or ill luck, of particular kinds of dreams.
Oneiromancy has thus slowly degenerated to folk-lore and supersti-
- ↑ T. Piderit, "Mimik und Physiognomik," 1867, p. 73.
- ↑ J. Cleland, "Evolution, Expression and Sensation," 1881.
- ↑ "Féré, "La Physiologie dans les Métaphores," Revue Philosophique, October, 1895.
- ↑ Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his "Die Symbolik in den Legenden: Märchen, Gebräuchen und Träumen," Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, Nos. 6 and 7, May, 1908.
