"We are obliged to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some power by which we are acted upon." - Spencer, First Principles.

The law of physical traits, transmitted from generation to generation, is too firmly established to admit of question, and atavism is a positive factor in the study of the human brain. Upon the same principle the psychology of ancestral or inherited memory should take a prominent position in both waking and dreaming consciousness. As yet the quantity and the quality of these bequeathed experiences are unclassified, for while they are generally granted as existent we can not be positive as to whether they are filmy, vanishing visions or impressions, too fragile to be worthy of record, or whether they are psychological entities to be prefigured even before their appearance in the realm of consciousness. The frequency with which dream experiences bear a grotesque resemblance to ancestral conditions permits us, in lieu of a more practicable theory, to regard them as representing the racial development of our forbears. Not only has the theory of inherited memory a certain therapeutic value but it is of distinct historical importance. In this instarrce the dreams of children and of uneducated persons deserve more consideration than those of the intellectually developed, who might naturally be supposed to be influenced by tradition, reason and acquired knowledge.

Professor Stanley Hall finds inherited memory, or atavism, most strongly indicated in the dreams universally classified as typical.

"Our animal ancestors were not birds and we cannot inherit sensations of flying, but they floated and swam for longer than they have had legs; they had a radically different mode of breathing and why may not there be vestigial traces of this in the soul as there of gill-slits under our necks? . . . To me sensations of hovering, gliding by an inner impulse rather than limbs, falling and rising have been from boyhood, very real, both sleeping and waking." - Study of Fear, Stanley Hall.

The same eminent authority also advocates the theory of atavism as an explanation of morbid fears. The fear dreams that are traceable to nothing within our actual or knowable experience are assumed to have been begotten by experiences of another age. They are unknown to the visual knowledge of the dreamer, and frequently it is impossible to articulate them into definite ideas, but they hover, shapeless, shadowy horrors in the subconsciousness; this especially applies to the terrors and dreams of childhood.

Authorities disagree as to the source of the creative faculty that frequently manifests in dreams, but the theory of inherited memory is the most generally accepted, even when, as in many instances, it implies the memory of past civilizations, which alone could have furnished the knowledge of conditions described in the dream.

The widely quoted experience of Professor Agassiz, in which he solved in his dream a problem that had baffled him for weeks, is a puzzle which has many answers. The obscure outline of a fossil fish on a marble slab meant nothing to the great naturalist who vainly endeavored to decide what portions of the marble should be chiseled away in order to bring the whole fish to light. At length the completed fish appeared in his dream; for three successive nights the vision returned, until finally he sat up in his darkened bedroom, made a sketch of the fish he had seen in his dream and, turning over, went back to sleep. The next morning he discovered that his dream-self had drawn the fish with sufficient accuracy to determine him to break the surface of the stone beneath which the fossil was concealed. This knowledge of piscatorial anatomy could scarcely have been inherited from ignorant forbears, nor could it have lain in the learned man's subconsciousness, for the fossil remains antedated any fish within his experience; and in view of the uncharted experiences in race history which the immensity of the nervous system makes possible, such a dream may naturally be attributed to inherited memory.

The objection put forth by many scientists to this doctrine is that it opens the door not only to reincarnation or metempsychosis, but to clairvoyance, spiritualism and other super-terrestrial modes of acquiring super-terrestrial knowledge - or theories. As yet the information acquired by these methods is challenged and held as scientific heresy, although Jung, Freud and many others at times draw perilously near the borderline. To quote Jung: "From all these signs it must be concluded that the soul has in some degree historical strata, the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the unconscious."

Inherited memories as translated by science, do not move in generations, they bound in centuries, and this idea is something akin to the teaching of reincarnation, or the rebirth of the same soul through countless lives and vast experiences whose memory is closed by the gates of birth and death. Between these portals the mortal may now and again catch startling glimpses of the terrors and joys of past lives. Most frequently these experiences come by way of dreams.

The acceptance or denial of these theories is a question, not of the theory, but of the student's temperament. There are in the present age two cardinal types of temperament, the scientific and the mystical. The latter accepts religious creeds without doubt or question; to these the light of the miracles shines in the sky to-day even as it did two thousand years ago. The former type, the scientific, questions religious faith, but takes for granted any statement upon which science has stamped approval. Between these poles range the varying degrees of religious faith and scientific skepticism.

Although superficially dissimilar there is but a narrow margin between the day-dream or reverie and the night dream. Both, we are told, are wish-dreams but the desires of the waking dream are trained and trellised by inhibition into the wall-fruits of fancy, while the night dream riots in strange and tropical growths. Humanity at large is prone to day-dreaming, but few of these visions are consistent with the tenor of daily life, although they are colored by its ideals. A momentary weariness of the brain, a flash of mental excitement, an unconscious loosening of the tension that civilized life demands as its toll upon the nerves, and reality and fancy draw together and come down upon us a tantalizing, indistinguishable pair. The day-dream of normality has its pretty whim faintly redolent of the forbidden or the impossible. The Judge's reverie in Whittier's Maud Muller, has made the simple verse classic through its "touch of nature." A somnolent, quaint hint of forbidden fancy is suggested when amid the squabbles of country attorneys the rural Solon drowsily hums "an old love time," and pictures Maud's "long-lashed hazel eyes." In fact the day-dreams of the average man are usually amusing rather than reprehensible and there is a gleam of drollery in their sentiment as they steal in on his moments of abstraction, usually enshrouded in trails of his favorite tobacco. While, however, the ordinary male thus lightly holds his reveries and day-dreams, regarding them either with a twist of mischief or a flush of boyish shame, his wife takes hers far more seriously. To the vapidity of her usually dull life her day-dreams seem splendidly colorful and fascinating. Instead of being crowded into spare moments to be furtively brushed aside, banished at the first call of reason, they fill an actual void and assume an importance that lends possibility to the thought of fulfillment. They are furthermore strengthened with a tang of youthful hope and a simulacrum of reality that experience with a work-a-day world has long since brushed from her husband's visionings. For except in the instance of genius, and of mysticism, and of childhood, life has a fashion of shattering the realism of dreams. The day-dream largely owes its existence to the loneliness of imaginative minds and to their instinctive groping for comprehension and sympathy. Thus poets turn to nature for the understanding that they miss among men, and as they personify her into kindliness, they recognize their own moods.