XXXVI BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY 



their speech is held to be the token of an arcanum whence the 

 word derives mystical powers; their ultimate opinions cluster 

 about a zoic pantheon. Most of the tribes instinctively or 

 deliberately withhold their abounding faith and conceal their 

 fiducial observances from unsympathetic aliens, sometimes 

 with such success that their very existence is doubted ; yet 

 expert inquiry indicates that all the tribesmen are devotees of 

 fiducial systems, closely coiTesponding among each other and 

 also with those of the primitive peoples of other continents. 

 The earlier researches served to throw light on the .stages of 

 philosophic development among the American aborigines 

 and other peoples. The first stage is that of difl:used mysti- 

 cism, in which the crude thinker conceives himself surrounded 

 by inscrutable potencies of capricious character, commonly 

 maleficent save when controlled by rites. In savagery there 

 is observed a growing tendency to withdraw mystical attri- 

 butes from things that are not conspicuous or do not play an 

 apparent part in the affairs of life, and to concentrate such 

 attributes in the great animals of the world, so that this stage 

 has been called zootheism. In the second stage the mystery 

 is withdrawn from conquerable animals and from things of 

 innocuous motion and sound, and is concentrated either in 

 physical manifestations like wind, storm, thunder, and light- 

 ning, or in the greater nature-objects like the sun, moon, and 

 ocean, and the powers or objects are invested with super- 

 natural attributes and assigned to the higher places of the 

 pantheon. 



Now, the sophic activities, unlike those of lower order, are 

 essentially intellectual, and grow out of the integration of the 

 primary activities, which are reshaped in turn through exercise 

 of the hig-her function: vet in these activities, as in those of lower 

 order, there are two antithetic developmental elements, {a) 

 individual initiative, and (&) collective assimilation. Doubt- 

 less the individual element predominates in range of activity, 

 since the normal brain sjjontaneousl)' produces concepts unceas- 

 ingly; yet only a few of these products go beyond the pro- 

 ducer, onlv a few of these are assimilated by others, and only 

 a few of those assimilated remain permanently in the great 



