MYTHOLOGIC PHILOSOPHY. 6\ 



ture's powers are giants, and to him these giants are gods -with wills 

 and purposes of their own, and he sees that man in his weakness can 

 succeed only by allying himself wdth the gods. Hence, imj^elled by 

 this philosophy, man must have coriimunion with the gods, and in this 

 communion he must influence them to work for himself. Hence, re- 

 ligion, which has to do with the relations which exist between the gods 

 and man, is the legitimate offspring of mythologic philosophy. 



Thus we see that out of mythologic philosophy, as branches of the 

 great tree itself, there grow ancientism, theistic society, sj)iritism, 

 thaumaturgics, mythic tales, and religion. 



y. — The Evolution of Mythologic Philosophy. 



I shall now give a summary characterization of zootheism, then 

 call attention to some of the relics of hecastotheism found therein, and 

 proceed with a brief statement of the higher stages of theism. The 

 apparent and easily accessible is studied first. In botany, the trees 

 and the conspicuous flowering plants of garden, field, and plain were 

 first known, and then all other plants were vaguely grouped as weeds ; 

 but, since the most conspicuous phenogamous plants were first studied, 

 what vast numbers of new orders, new genera, and new species have 

 been discovered, in the progress of research, to the lowest cryptogams ! 



In the study of ethnology, we first recognized the more civilized 

 races. The Aryan, Hamites, Shemites, and Chinese, and the rest were 

 the weeds of humanity — the barbarian and savage, sometimes called 

 Turanians. But, when we come carefully to study these lower people, 

 what numbers of races are discovered ! In North America alone we 

 have more than seventy-five — seventy-five stocks of people speaking 

 seventy-five stocks of language, and some single stocks embracing 

 many distinct languages and dialects. The languages of the Algonquin 

 family are as diverse as the Indo-European tongues. So are the lan- 

 guages of the Dakota, the Numa, the Tinne, and others ; so that in 

 North America we have more than five hundred languages spoken to- 

 day. Each linguistic stock is found to have a philosophy of its own, 

 and each stock as many branches of philosojihy as it has languages 

 and dialects. North America presents a magnificent field for the 

 study of savage and barbaric philosophies. 



This vast region of thought has been explored only by a few 

 adventurous travelers in the world of science. No thorough survey of 

 any part has been made. Yet the general outlines of North American 

 philosophy are known, but the exact positions, the details, are all yet 

 to be filled in — as the geography of the general outline of North 

 America is known by exploration, but the exact positions and de- 

 tails of topography are yet to be filled in as the result of careful sur- 

 vey. Myths of the Algonquin stock are found in many a volume of 

 Americana, the best of which were recorded by the early missionaries 

 who came from Europe, though we find some of them, mixed with 



