806 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ings of a people, not only discovers the thoughts pm-posely recorded 

 in those writings, but is able to go back in the history of the people 

 many generations, and discover with even greater certainty the 

 thoughts of the more ancient people who made the words. Thus the 

 writings of the Greeks, the Hindoos, and the Egyptians, that give an 

 account of their psychic gods, also contain a description of an earlier 

 theism unconsciously recorded by the writers themselves. Psychothe- 

 ism prevailed when the sentences were coined, physitheism when the 

 words were coined. So the philologist discovers physitheism in all 

 ancient literature. But the verity of that stage of philosophy does 

 not rest alone upon the evidence derived from the study of fossil phi- 

 losophies through the science of philology. In the folk-lore of every 

 civilized people having a psychotheic philosophy, an earlier philoso- 

 phy with nature-gods is discovered. 



The different stages of philosophy which I have attempted to char- 

 acterize have never been found in purity. We always observe differ- 

 ent methods of explanation existing side by side, and the type of a 

 philosophy is determined by the prevailing characteristics of its expla- 

 nation of phenomena. Fragments of earlier are always found side by 

 side with the greater body of the later philosophy. Man has never 

 clothed himself in new garments of wisdom, but has for ever been 

 patching the old, and the old and the new are blended in the same 

 pattern, and thus we have atavism in philosophy. So in the study of 

 any philosophy which has reached the psychotheic age, patches of the 

 earlier philosophy are always seen. Ancient nature-gods are found to 

 be living and associating with the supreme psychic deities. Thus in an- 

 thropological science there are three ways by which to go back in the 

 history of any civilized people and learn of its barbaric physitheism. 

 But of the verity of this stage we have further evidence. When 

 Christianity was carried north from central Europe, the champions of 

 the new philosophy, and its consequent religion, discovered, among 

 those who dwelt by the glaciers of the north, a barbaric philosophy 

 which they have preserved to history in the Eddas and Sagas, and 

 Norse literature is full of a philosophy in a transition state, from phy- 

 sitheism to psychotheism ; and, mark ! the people discovered in this 

 transition state were inventing an alphabet they were carving Runes. 

 Then a pure physitheism was discovered in the Aztec barbarism of 

 Mexico, and elsewhere on the globe many people were found in that 

 stage of culture to which this philosophy properly belongs. Thus the 

 existence of physitheism as a stage of philosophy is abundantly attest-- 

 ed. Comparative mythologists are agreed in recognizing these two 

 stages. They might not agree to throw all of the higher and later 

 philosophies into one group, as I have done, but all recognize the plane 

 of demarkation between the higher and the lower groups as I have 

 drawn it. Scholars, too, have come essentially to an agreement that 

 physitheism is earlier and older than psychotheism. Perhaps there 



