, are to be
the subjects of our study. Then will remain the formidable undertaking
of reducing the authentic materials thus obtained to system and order,
and this not by any preconceived theory of what they ought to conform
to, but learning from them the very laws of religious growth they
illustrate. The historian traces the birth of arts, science, and
government to man's dependence on nature and his fellows for the means
of self-preservation. Not that man receives these endowments from
without, but that the stern step-mother, Nature, forces him by threats
and stripes to develop his own inherent faculties. So with religion: The
idea of God does not, and cannot, proceed from the external world, but,
nevertheless, it finds its _historical_ origin also in the desperate
struggle for life, in the satisfaction of the animal wants and passions,
in those vulgar aims and motives which possessed the mind of the
primitive man to the exclusion of everything else.

There is an ever present embarrassment in such inquiries. In dealing
with these matters beyond the cognizance of the senses, the mind is
forced to express its meaning in terms transferred from sensuous
perceptions, or under symbols borrowed from the material world. These
transfers must be understood, these symbols explained, before the real
meaning of a myth can be reached. He who fails to guess the riddle of
the sphynx, need not hope to gain admittance to the shrine. With
delicate ear the faint whispers of thought must be apprehended which
prompt the intellect when it names the immaterial from the material;
when it chooses from the infinity of visible forms those meet to shadow
forth Divinity.

Two lights will guide us on this venturesome path. Mindful of the
watchword of inductive science, to proceed from the known to the
unknown, the inquiry will be put whether the aboriginal languages of
America employ the same tropes to express such ideas as deity, spirit,
and soul, as our own and kindred tongues. If the answer prove
affirmative, then not only have we gained a firm foothold whence to
survey the whole edifice of their mythology; but from an unexpected
quarter arises evidence of the unity of our species far weightier than
any mere anatomy can furnish, evidence from the living soul, not from
the dead body. True that the science of American linguistics is still in
its infancy, and that a proper handling of the materials it even now
offers involves a more critical acqua