58 JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 



is curiously constructed. Its chief hypothesis is that man was 

 primitively endowed with fundamental principles as a basis of rea- 

 soning, and that these principles can be formulated. These funda- 

 mental principles are supposed to be universal, and to be every- 

 where accepted by mankind as self-evident propositions of the 

 highest order, and of the broadest generalisation. These funda- 

 mental propositions were called major propositions. The machine, 

 in formal logic, was a verbal juxtaposition of propositions with the 

 major propositions at the head, followed by the minor propositions, 

 and from this truth was supposed to flow. 



"This formal logic of the Aristotelian epoch has lived from 

 that period to the period of science. Logic is the instrument of 

 metaphysics, and metaphysic philosophy, in its multifarious forms, 

 is the product of logic. But during all that time 2,000 years no 

 truth has been discovered, no error has been detected, by the use 

 of the logical machine. Its fundamental assumption is false. 



"It has been discovered that man is not endowed with a body 

 of major propositions. It is found that in the course of the evolu- 

 tion of mind minor propositions are discovered first, and major 

 propositions are reached only by the combination of minor propo- 

 sitions; that always in the search for truth the minor proposition 

 comes first, and that no major proposition can ever be accepted 

 until the minor propositions included therein have been demon- 

 strated. 



"The error in the metaphysic philosophy was the assumption 

 that the great truths were already known by mankind, and that by 

 the proper use of the logical machine all minor truths could be dis- 

 covered, and all errors eliminated from philosophy. As metaphysic 

 methods of reasoning were wrong, metaphysic philosophies were 

 false; the body of metaphysic philosophy is a phantasmagoria." 1 



Two important essays cannot be included under any of the 

 above classes, as they discuss the material of all. They treat of 

 the methods to be pursued in anthropologic research and the 

 methods to be avoided, of the fruitful lines of inquiry and the bar- 

 ren, of the dangers from the use of superficial observations and of 

 the dangers from faulty principles of interpretation. They are to 

 a certain extent the codification of the counsel by which he has 

 guided the work of his associates in the Bureau of Ethnology, and 

 they are contained in the Annual Reports of the Bureau. One is 

 on "Limitations to the Use of Certain Anthropologic Data," the 

 other on "Activital Similarities." 



\Biolog. Soc, Wash., Proc., Vol. I., p. 63. 



