NATIONAL ACADEMY BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS VOL. VIII 



state, and change becomes event" (Bureau of Ethnol., 

 Ann. Rep., 1900, pp. LVI, LVII). In another direction, he went 

 so far as to conceive consciousness as one of the primary 

 attributes of the particle : it would seem here as if, in the effort 

 to know the unknown, he had reverted from the philosophy of 

 civilization to that of savagery ; it is indeed curious to find that 

 one long practiced in observational sciences, and who had years 

 before recognized the necessarily large subjective element in 

 all philosophies, should at last persuade himself that, in a mat- 

 ter so recondite as the primary attributes of the particle, his 

 mental concepts were really the true counterparts of external 

 nature, from however much cogitation they had sprung. 



y SERIES. 



During the eight years that elapsed between Powell's resig- 

 nation from the directorship of the Geological Survey in 1894 

 and his death in 1902, a subject that attracted him greatly was 

 the study of human activities familiar matters for the most 

 part, so that his explicit statement of them sometimes seemed 

 like the unnecessary formulation of the common-place but 

 his object here must have been to bring even familiar matters 

 to conscious attention, and to discover in them their essential 

 and wonderful nature, especially wonderful when they are 

 viewed as products of long-continued evolution. It was as 

 if Powell wished to arouse us from our indifference to every- 

 day affairs, and to place them objectively in the great proces- 

 sion of the world's march, with all the dignity belonging to 

 their ancient origin. Such seem to be the motives underlying 

 his study of the "pentalogic series of human activities," in 

 which he classed everything connected with man's "pleasures, 

 industries, in. titutions, languages, and opinions." He saw that 

 the study of these activities gave rise to five sciences, "esthet- 

 ology, technology, sociology, philology, and sophiology," each 

 of which is again divided; for example, sophiology, or the 

 science of instruction, contains five arts "nurture, oratory, 

 education, publication, and research." So fully was Powell 

 convinced of the value of his pentalogic scheme, that for a 

 time his administrative reports on the investigations conducted 



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