JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 57 



ing in himself will and design, and by inductive reason discovering 

 will and design in his fellow men and in animals, he extends the 

 induction to all the cosmos, and there discovers in all things will 

 and design. All phenomena are supposed to be the acts of some 

 one and that some one having will and purpose. In mythologic 

 philosophy the phenomena of the outer physical world are sup- 

 posed to be the acts of living, willing, designing personages. The 

 simple are compared with and explained by the complex. In scien- 

 tific philosophy, phenomena are supposed to be children of ante- 

 cedent phenomena, and so far as science goes with its explanation 

 they are thus interpreted. Man with the subjective phenomena 

 gathered about him is studied from an objective point of view and 

 the phenomena of subjective life are relegated to the categories 

 established in the classification of the phenomena of the outer 

 world ; thus the complex is studied by resolving it into its simple 

 constituents." 1 



"In Shoshoni, the rainbow is a beautiful serpent that abrades 

 the firmament of ice to give us snow and rain. In Norse, the rain- 

 bow is the bridge Bifrost spanning the space between heaven and 

 earth. In the Iliad, the rainbow is the goddess Iris, the messenger 

 of the King of Olympus. In Hebrew, the rainbow is the witness 

 to a covenant. In science, the rainbow is an analysis of white light 

 into its constituent colors by the refraction of raindrops." 2 



Powell's own philosophy, to the formulation of which he de- 

 voted several years, is published in Truth and Error, a volume 

 which contains also a treatise on psychology. Had his full plan 

 been carried out, Truth and Error would have been followed by 

 two other books, the second bearing the title Good and Evil. The 

 writing of the second book was completed the last effective work 

 of his life and its chapters were printed as independent essays in 

 the American Anthropologist. One of them, "The Categories," 

 pertains to the field of general philosophy; the others have already 

 been mentioned as treatises on human activities. 



His only writing devoted largely to intellectual methods is an 

 address to the Biological Society- of Washington at its Darwin 

 Memorial Meeting in 1882. Three groups of philosophies are here 

 recognised, the mythologic, the metaphysic, and the scientific. It 

 is shown that the method of metaphysics is formal logic, while the 

 method of science consists of induction and hypothesis. 



"Now the machine called logic, the tool of the metaphysician, 



^American Association Adv. Set., Proc., Vol. XXVIIL, pp. 253-254. 

 2 American Association Adv. Set'., Proc., Vol. XXVIIL, p. 259. 



