20 MYTHOLOGY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
In all stages of savage, barbaric, and civilized inquiry, every question 
has found an answer, every how has had its thus, every why its because. 
The sum of the answers to the questions raised by any people constitute 
its philosophy; hence all peoples have had philosophies consisting of 
their accepted explanation of things. Such a philosophy must neces- 
sarily result from the primary instincts developed in man in the early 
progress of his differentiation from the beast. This I postulate: if 
demonstration is necessary, demonstration is at hand. Not only has 
every people a philosophy, but every stage of culture is characterized by 
its stage of philosophy. Philosophy has been unfolded with the evolu- 
tion of the human understanding. The history of philosophy is the 
history of human opinions from the earlier to the later days—from the 
lower to the higher culture. 
In the production of a philosophy, phenomena must be discerned, dis- 
criminated, classified. Discernment, discrimination, and classification are 
the processes by which a philosophy is developed. In studying the 
philosophy of a people at any stage of culture, to understand what such 
a people entertain as the sum of their knowledge, it is necessary that we 
should understand what phenomena they saw, heard, felt, discerned; 
what discriminations they made, and what resemblances they seized upon 
as a basis for the classification on which their explanations rested. A 
philosophy will be higher in the scale, nearer the truth, as the discern- 
ment is wider, the discrimination nicer, and the classification better. 
The sense of the savage is dull compared with the sense of the civil- 
ized man. There is a myth current in civilization to the effect that the 
barbarian has highly developed perceptive faculties. It has no more 
foundation than the myth of the wisdom of the owl. A savage sees but 
few sights, hears but few sounds, tastes but few flavors, smells but few 
odors; his whole sensuous life is narrow and blunt, and his facts that 
are nade up of the combination of sensuous impressions are few. In 
comparison, the civilized man has his vision extended away toward 
the infinitesimal and away toward the infinite; his perception of sound 
is multiplied to the comprehension of rapturous symphonies; his per- 
ception of taste is increased to the enjoyment of delicious viands; his 
perception of smell is developed to the appreciation of most exquisite 
perfumes; and his facts that are made up of the combination of sensuous 
impressions are multiplied beyond enumeration. The stages of discern- 
ment from the lowest savage to the highest civilized man constitute a 
series the end of which is far from the beginning. 
If the discernment of the savage is little, his discrimination is less. 
All his sensuous perceptions are contused; but the confusion of con- 
fusion is that universal habit of savagery—the confusion of thé object- 
ive with the subjective—so that the savage sees, hears, tastes, smells, 
feels the imaginings of hisown mind. Subjectively determined sensuous 
processes are diseases in civilization, but normal, functional methods in 
savagery. 
