pt his spirit free from the clog
of pride, cupidity, or envy, and carried out, as he believed, the divine
decree--a matter profoundly important to him.

It was not, then, wholly from ignorance or improvidence that he failed
to establish permanent towns and to develop a material civilization.
To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific
mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is
good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not
less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary
dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close
contact with one's fellow-men. All who have lived much out of doors know
that there is a magnetic and nervous force that accumulates in solitude
and that is quickly dissipated by life in a crowd; and even his enemies
have recognized the fact that for a certain innate power and self-poise,
wholly independent of circumstances, the American Indian is unsurpassed
among men.

The red man divided mind into two parts,--the spiritual mind and the
physical mind. The first is pure spirit, concerned only with the essence
of things, and it was this he sought to strengthen by spiritual prayer,
during which the body is subdued by fasting and hardship. In this type
of prayer there was no beseeching of favor or help. All matters of
personal or selfish concern, as success in hunting or warfare, relief
from sickness, or the sparing of a beloved life, were definitely
relegated to the plane of the lower or material mind, and all
ceremonies, charms, or incantations designed to secure a benefit or to
avert a danger, were recognized as emanating from the physical self.

The rites of this physical worship, again, were wholly symbolic, and the
Indian no more worshiped the Sun than the Christian adores the Cross.
The Sun and the Earth, by an obvious parable, holding scarcely more of
poetic metaphor than of scientific truth, were in his view the parents
of all organic life. From the Sun, as the universal father, proceeds the
quickening principle in nature, and in the patient and fruitful womb of
our mother, the Earth, are hidden embryos of plants and men. Therefore
our reverence and love for them was really an imaginative extension of
our love for our immediate parents, and with this sentiment of filial
piety was joined a willingness to appeal to them, as to a father, for
such good gifts as we may desire.