76 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Way of Cows " ; the Cymris associated it with, the course of the 

 wind; for Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the 

 Persians viewed it as the route along which the straw carrier drew 

 his burden; to this day the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of 

 the Chiefs." * 



Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer reali- 

 ties are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by man and by 

 the societies which he forms. Such words as " attraction," " repul- 

 sion," " resistance," " nature," " body," " atom," " current," contain 

 obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the idea 

 conveyed by the term " inertia " may be more or less veiled by un- 

 familiar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again in Tragheit, 

 "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase "natural 

 selection " contains a teleological element which has more than once 

 been used to throw discredit on the process which it describes. And 

 when one observes how persistently such an anthropopathic expres- 

 sion as " affinity " is still applied to chemical reaction, or with what 

 naivete the term " law " is transferred from the realm of human juris- 

 prudence into the domain of natural processes, one ceases to wonder 

 at the constant confusions of outer with inner in which so much of 

 the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin. 



It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to 

 interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of self -pro- 

 jection should not also be valid for the larger relations of his mental 

 activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from the applica- 

 tion of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes of Nature, 

 to the employment regarding such processes of anthropomorphic 

 thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its fancy in the dis- 

 covery of some strange face as suggested to him in the decorations of 

 the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in tracing out from 

 the contours of clothes hung up within range of his vision the pre- 

 posterous outline or figure of some human likeness or caricature, so 

 the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity, traces out from 

 the larger patterns of the moving world about him the organic shapes, 

 embodying will and personality, that are to serve him as explanations 

 of the external power which touches his existence for good or for 

 evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into relations 

 with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life which 

 make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the 

 process that the characters thus projected into the environment must 

 always throughout the history of human ascent, and at every par- 

 ticular stage of it be closely and definitely correlated with the degree 

 and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source. 



* Les Origines Indo-Europ6ennes. Pictet, p. 668. 



