telling a folk story is at night, when the day's work is done, and both narrator and listeners are tired. Now it is a well-known psychological principle that fatigue is favourable to the play of fancy. Thus not only does imagination run riot in the mind of the story-teller, but the listeners also submit themselves readily to the sway of wonders. Both attention and volition are usually weakened in fatigue, and thus normal critical control is in abeyance, and many things which would be thrust impatiently aside during the daytime, seem to find a fitting and acceptable place in the folk story.
More important still however—since it gives us not merely the general setting, but an explanation of particular details—is the further consideration that in the state of fatigue, kinaesthetic sensibility is far less acute than it is normally. When a man is fresh and vigorous, the planning of large practical enterprises, while it may be pleasant enough in itself, is always accompanied by an uneasy sense of troublesome labours to come. But let the motor sense be dulled and the most gigantic toil can be happily contemplated. For its results appear, and are pleasing, while the strain of achievement is absent, and that also is pleasing.
This lessening of motor sensibility provides a most delightfully fruitful consideration. For, as everybody who is acquainted with the history of psychological study will know, there is practically nothing in human experience which, at some time or another, has not been plausibly set down to the "muscular sense," as it used to be called. With the diminution of that experience of resistance which arises as a result of motor reaction, the human body loses its compelling and restricting capability, becoming light and wiry, and able to go anywhere. Further, external shapes are changed. It is as easy for an animal to have one form as another, and kaleidoscopic changes of body are a commonplace. All that now guarantees the identity of
