56 JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 



tions in various classical and modern systems of philosophy. The 

 fourth outlines the evolution of philosophies as an introduction to 

 classification of the ways in which opinions are propagated. Per- 

 haps a fifth paper should be added to this group, an essay on "The 

 Evolution of Religion," contributed to The Monist in 1898. The 

 following extracts are selected from the first and second essays : 



"To fully present to you the condition of savagery, as illus- 

 trated in their philosophy, three obstacles appear. After all the 

 years I have spent among the Indians in their mountain villages, I 

 am not certain that I have sufficiently divorced myself from the 

 thoughts and ways of civilisation to properly appreciate their child- 

 ish beliefs. The second obstacle subsists in your own knowledge 

 of the methods and powers of nature, and the ways of civilised so- 

 ciety; and when I attempt to tell you what an Indian thinks, I fear 

 you will never fully forget what you know, and thus you will be led 

 to give too deep a meaning to a savage explanation ; or, on the 

 Other hand, contrasting an Indian concept with your own, the mani- 

 fest absurdity will sound to you as an idle tale too simple to de- 

 serve mention, or too false to deserve credence. The third diffi- 

 culty lies in the attempt to put savage thoughts into civilised lan- 

 guage; our words are so full of meaning, carry with them so many 

 great thoughts and collateral ideas. In English I say 'wind,' and 

 you think of atmosphere in revolution with the earth, heated at the 

 tropics and cooled at the poles, and set into great currents that are 

 diverted from their courses in passing back and forth from tropical 

 to polar regions ; you think of ten thousand complicating conditions 

 by which local currents are produced, and the word suggests all 

 the lore of the Weather Bureau, that great triumph of American 

 science. But I say neir to a savage, and he thinks of a great mon- 

 ster, a breathing beast beyond the mountains of the west." * 



"There are two grand stages of philosophy, the mythologic 

 and the scientific. In the first, all phenomena are explained by 

 analogies derived from subjective human experiences; in the lat- 

 ter, phenomena are explained as orderly successions of events. 



"In sublime egotism man first interprets the cosmos as an ex- 

 tension of himself; he classifies the phenomena of the outer world 

 by their analogies with subjective phenomena; his measure of dis- 

 tance is his own pace, his measure of time his own sleep, for he 

 says, ' It is a thousand paces to the great rock,' or 'It is a hundred 

 sleeps to the great feast.* Noises are voices, powers are hands, 

 movements are made afoot. By subjective examination discover- 



1 American Geog. Soc. Journal, Vol. VIII., p. 253. 



