In the nineteenth century, writings on dreams proliferated at an even faster pace than in the eighteenth, but interest in the significant dream, as understood for thousands of years, sharply declined. Especially as the century progressed, most researchers were concerned with particular facts and general laws, not with finding the meaning of dreams. Many simply ignored belief in the prophetic dream or dismissed it as a historical curiosity or the province of the ignorant and superstitious. In the wake of Enlightenment attacks on superstitious belief in dreams, it should come as no surprise when Graffunder, for example, writes that in our day often “a small backdoor for such outgrown insanity remains open” (1894, 14). It also comes as no surprise when the bishop of Mainz affirms that there is no difficulty in assuming a prophetic significance to dreams sent by God or angels, but that one must explain a dream supernaturally only after exhausting physiological and psychological explanations (Haffner 1884, 326– 7). But, given the confident narratives of the triumph of rationalism and secularization, it may come as more of a surprise to find, even toward the end of the century, that some authors (e.g., Hildebrandt 1875, 25– 36; De Sanctis 1899, 365– 87) feel the need for lengthy, skeptical considerations of the possibility of prophetic dreams, even though the conclusion, as at the end of the eighteenth century, is that there is no convincing example. De Sanctis, in fact, begins his first book on dreams by declaring it the duty of science to prevent the renovation of dream symbolism and to wrest the study of dreams away from astrologers, priests and spiritualists (1896b, 14). Reviewing his second book, Ferenczi (1902) singles out De Sanctis's balanced consideration of the marvelous in dreams, praising him for neither rejecting it a priori or accepting it with unmotivated faith, and chooses that chapter for translation into Hungarian. Freud calls it a mistake to think that belief in the supernatural origin of dreams lacks adherents in his day and declares that discussion of the divinatory power of dreams continues because attempts at explanation have not come to terms with the material collected, no matter how unambiguously anyone devoted to scientific explanation is inclined to reject such a claim (1900b, 4– 5).