meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease.' Now, we may
still 'meditate'--and how far the result is 'morbid' is a matter for
psychologists and pathologists to determine. Fasting we do not practise
voluntarily, nor would we easily accept evidence from an Englishman as to
the veracity of voluntary fasting visions, like those of Cotton Mather.
The visions of disease we should set aside, as a rule, with those of
'excitement,' produced, for instance, by 'devil-dances.' Narcotic and
alcoholic visions are not in question.[19] For our purpose the _induced_
trances of savages (in whatever way voluntarily brought on) are analogous
to the modern induced hypnotic trance. Any supernormal acquisitions of
knowledge in these induced conditions, among savages, would be on a par
with similar alleged experiences of persons under hypnotism.

We do not differ from known savages in being able to bring on non-normal
psychological conditions, but we produce these, as a rule, by other
methods than theirs, and such experiments are not made on _all_ of us, as
they were on all Red Indian boys and girls in the 'medicine-fast,' at
the age of puberty.

Further, in their normal state, known savages, or some of them, are more
'suggestible' than educated Europeans at least.[20] They can be more
easily hallucinated in their normal waking state by suggestion. Once more,
their intervals of hunger, followed by gorges of food, and their lack of
artificial light, combine to make savages more apt to see what is not
there than are comfortable educated white men. But Mr. Tylor goes too far
when he says 'where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has
come to amuse himself with fancies.'[21] The civilised man, beyond all
doubt, is capable of being _enfantosmé_.

In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr.