ater philosophy. Man has never
clothed himself in new garments of wisdom, but has ever been patching
the old, and the old and the new are blended in the same pattern, and
thus we have atavism in philosophy. So in the study of any philosophy
which has reached the psychotheistic age, patches of the earlier
philosophy are always seen. Ancient nature-gods are found to be living
and associating with the supreme psychic deities. Thus in anthropologic
science there are three ways by which, to go back in the history of any
civilized people and learn of its barbaric physitheism. But of the
verity of this stage we have further evidence. When Christianity was
carried north from Central Europe, the champions of the new philosophy,
and its consequent religion, discovered, among those who dwelt by the
glaciers of the north, a barbaric philosophy which they have preserved
to history in the Eddas and Sagas, and Norse literature is full of a
philosophy in a transition state, from physitheism to psychotheism; and,
mark! the people discovered in this transition state were inventing an
alphabet--they were carving Runes. Then a pure physitheism was
discovered in the Aztec barbarism of Mexico; and elsewhere on the globe
many people were found in that stage of culture to which this philosophy
properly belongs. Thus the existence of physitheism as a stage of
philosophy is abundantly attested. Comparative mythologists are agreed
in recognizing these two stages. They might not agree to throw all of
the higher and later philosophies into one group, as I have done, but
all recognize the plane of demarkation between the higher and the lower
groups as I have drawn it. Scholars, too, have come essentially to an
agreement that physitheism is earlier and older than psychotheism.
Perhaps there may be left a "doubting Thomas" who believes that the
highest stage of psychotheism--that is, monotheism--was the original
basis for the philosophy of the world, and that all other forms are
degeneracies from that primitive and perfect state. If there be such a
man left, to him what I have to say about philosophy is blasphemy.

Again, all students of comparative philosophy, or comparative mythology,
or comparative religion, as you may please to approach this subject from
different points of view, recognize that there is something else; that
there are philosophies, or mythologies, or religions, not included in
the two great groups. All that something else has been v