omnipotence of thoughts, instantaneous wish fulfillment, secret harmful forces and the return of the dead. there is no mistaking the conditions under which the sense of the uncanny arises here. we - or our primitive forebears- once regarded such things as real possibilities; we were convinced that they really did happen. Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of thought. yet we do not feel entirely sure  in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the lookout for confirmation. Now as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny and this may be reinforced by judgments like the following; "so it's true, then, that you can kill another man just by wishing him dead, that the dead do really go on living and manifest themselves at the scene of there former activities' and so on.