According to the current press, King Peter of Servia finds the sixth sense an inconvenient dream factor.

Extract from the London Chronicle, dated May, 1913.

"London, May 10th, 4 45 a. m. - The Belgrade Correspondent sends this account of the distracted condition of mind to which King Peter has been reduced by the anxieties of his monarchy.

". . . He (the King) also suffers from insomnia and when he does sleep is haunted by the most horrible dreams. Unable to sleep, he rises at 2 a. m., and calls the officer on watch to keep him company.

"He complained to one of them that he dreams of seeing King Milan running through the corridors with a drawn sword in his hand shouting: 'Where are the murderers of my son?'

"These dreams, which seem to be frequently recurring, make such an impression on the King that they are beginning to exercise a visible effect on his health."

Bishop Brent coincides with occultism in regarding the sixth sense as the future attainment of the human race; tradition, legend and folklore, however, point to its having been the possession of mankind in the remote past. The growing importance of these last named factors in the establishment of neglected facts can not be too highly estimated. The enlightening work of such patient students as Dr. Frazier in England and Mr. Henry W. Shoemaker in America are of inestimable value in the rehabilitating of facts that history has discredited.

The universal legend of a Golden Age and the powers attributed alike to god and hero imply supernormal qualities that corroborate man's former possession of a sixth sense. The fall of Adam, of the Nibelungs, the legends of Parnassus whither the gods withdrew from earth, the story of the Tower of Babel bear salient points of resemblance that preclude the theory of coincidence.

The legends of great floods that destroyed entire races are confirmed by geological evidence. And despite scientific doubt of the existence of the Continent of Atlantis, a persistent tradition holds that a universal and deliberate disregard of certain natural laws led to its gradual submergence in the sea.

Natives of the Hebrides and Canary Islands, the Basque Pyrenees Mountains and of certain lofty cantons in Switzerland are more generally gifted with second sight, or clairvoyance than any peoples known to modern man. Science attributes this peculiarity to geographical isolation and its resulting loneliness which is conducive to habits of introspection and to the idea of seership. We are not told why this condition does not apply to other spots in the world equally lonely, whose inhabitants possess no mystical characteristics whatever. Occultists explain the singular gifts of inhabitants of the localities just mentioned, by the statement that these points are supposedly the highest peaks of the submerged Continent of Atlantis.

Believers in knowledge that transcends physical laws as the world knows them are taught to withhold their knowledge from humanity at large until the world has become spiritually fitted for its use, hence students of psychic subjects are prone to withdraw from the world. Every race and every creed has had its cult of hierophants and dreamers, mystics whose development of the sixth sense has gone hand in hand with dreams.

When the Spaniards discovered Central America with its astounding civilization the difficulty in subduing the new country lay not with the simple natives, but with the priests, who persistently prophesied evil to result from the advent of the newcomers. The invaders were piqued that untutored heathen, priests of the sun, should penetrate the guile beneath their smiles, for many of their adventurous crew were courtiers of old Spain, diplomats of an effete civilization. They could bide their time, however, until the priests of the old faith were imprisoned, dead or otherwise disposed of. Later, as the Aztecs toiled under Spanish chains, forcible converts to a new religion, the Christian priests listened, half amused and half indignant to tales of their predecessors, the sun-worshipers, who held no earthly possessions, yet whose dreams taught them the hearts of men. Emissaries of Satan, declared . the Christian fathers piously, and proceeded to extort more gold to send to Spain.

For in that era the priesthood of the so-called old world had abandoned their dreams of celestial glory and had become shrewd financiers bent on acquiring temporal power for the church. And the sixth sense had ceased to manifest save in the case of some saintly ascetic who had left the world for the cloister.

Thus the sordid world from which the visionaries had withdrawn moved on, growing more material as time passed, and the clergy who had remained in the world must keep pace with their flocks if they would serve them, for the teacher must not be too far above his charge. To each age and to each people are allotted the ideals of which its dreams are made.

The priests of the Aztecs and Incas, the Magi of Egypt and Assyria, the Oracles of Greece, the Vestals of Rome, and the Druids of Northern Europe deliberately acquired and cultivated the sixth sense through isolation, meditation and the avoidance of secular cares. Every tribe of so-called barbarians of the present day has its medicine man or high priest who lives apart from the people and gives counsel and guidance when they stand in need, setting thereby an example that civilization might wisely follow.

The existence of the sixth sense in children and in animals is referred to in the adage that "Children and dogs know who love them." Later life develops reason in the child and intuition, or the sixth sense, becomes atrophied precisely as any of the other senses might do under disuse; not so, however, with the animal who retains alike instinct and faith.

Certain schools of philosophical reasoning have traced the universal idea of a Divine Spirit and Creator to the dreams and traditions of primitive man. In which case, being true, the world owes more to dreams than it wots of. Unquestionably, primitive races hold the more salient attributes of the sixth sense that civilized man has all but lost, a condition due not to lack of civilization in the primitive races, but to their strength of faith, the dynamic element in the human soul. Commercialism, not civilization, has cramped men's psychic development, and thus the man who lives under the stars and among the greening, growing things, holds a truer, stronger faith than he whose vision is circumscribed by the walls of a counting house. The difference in the point of view of the two types is illustrated in the dream of flying, scientifically termed a "typical" dream or one common to all ages and races. Visionaries regard this dream with ecstasy, as a promise of the life to come when time nor space shall be; materialists attribute it to vertigo, heart failure, or some other physical cause and point to it triumphantly as the basic origin of the notion of angels and of angelic visitations. Primitive races and children are held responsible for the idea, admittedly as old as mankind. And insofar as this goes, faith and science may agree, for probably the primitive races and children were the first to see angels and to recognize them.