I20 MCGEE 



Bacon. In framing his " Novum Organum " this unexcelled 

 genius clearly saw, and affirmed, what the earlier philosophers 

 had only half perceived, i. e., that Mind is a mirror of Nature, 

 and hence that what men call knowledge is but a more or less 

 imperfect reflection of external Nature. All of these great 

 thinkers, like the leaders of the earlier epoch, helped to shape 

 the life of Powell ; he began his intellectual career as a Lin- 

 nean ; then, like other naturalists of his time, he became a Dar- 

 winian ; and during his later years he became, perhaps more 

 fully than any other of his generation, a Baconian. 



The first epoch in the growth of definite knowledge was that 

 of the physical, or exact, sciences ; the second was that of the 

 natural sciences ; and these were followed by a third — in some 

 respects an echo of the second — in which the human sciences 

 took shape. During this epoch the experiences of decades were 

 summed, rather than those of generations or centuries as in 

 earlier times ; and the experiences were especially those of the 

 variables of Nature found in human conduct. The students 

 were of the explorers and pioneer settlers pushing out over new 

 lands inhabited by alien peoples, especially the continents of 

 the western hemisphere. These soon learned from stress of 

 contact that the really essential characters of alien races are not 

 those of structure or stature or skin color, but those of habitual 

 conduct ; and as the quickened experiences pressed, the more 

 thoughtful of the pioneers were led to classify the aborigines by 

 their actions and dispositions, with little regard for their physical 

 characters. This was the germ of a rejuvenated ethnology, 

 /. e., a science of races based on human rather than animal at- 

 tributes ; and it was an easy step thence to the definition of 

 tribes by their special habits of thought and the speech in which 

 these were expressed. Although this third epoch in the history 

 of science began a generation or two before Powell, he arose in 

 time to give it character ; he became the chief prophet of the 

 doctrine of the differences between human and other animals, 

 just as Linne and Huxley and Darwin were the leading apostles 

 of the similarities of all animate Nature ; he stood almost alone 

 in seeking to raise the humanities — or the human activities, to 

 use his own term — to the plane of scientific research; and 



