On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropologic Data

by John Wesley Powell

In the earlier history of mankind philosophy was the product of subjective reasoning, giving mythologies and metaphysics. When it was discovered that the whole structure of philosophy was without foundation, a new order of procedure was recommended—the Baconian method. Perception must precede reflection; observation must precede reason. This also was a failure. The earlier gave speculations; the later give a mass of incoherent facts and falsehoods. The error in the earlier philosophy was not in the order of procedure between perception and reflection, but in the method, it being subjective instead of objective. The method of reasoning in scientific philosophy is purely objective; the method of reasoning in mythology and metaphysics is subjective.

The difference between man and the animals most nearly related to him in structure is great. The connecting forms are no longer extant. This subject of research, therefore, belongs to the paleontologists rather than the ethnologists. The biological facts are embraced in the geological record, and this record up to the present time has yielded but scant materials to serve in its solution.

It is known that man, highly differentiated from lower animals in morphologic characteristics, existed in early Quaternary and perhaps in Pliocene times, and here the discovered record ends.

LANGUAGE.

In philology, North America presents the richest field in the world, for here is found the greatest number of languages distributed among the greatest number of stocks. As the progress of research is necessarily from the known to the unknown, civilized languages were studied by scholars before the languages of savage and barbaric tribes. Again, the higher languages are written and are thus immediately accessible. For such reasons, chief attention has been given to the most highly developed languages. The problems presented to the philologist, in the higher languages, cannot be properly solved without a knowledge of the lower forms. The linguist studies a language that he may use it as an instrument for the interchange of thought; the philologist studies a language to use its data in the construction of a philosophy of language. It is in this latter sense that the higher languages are unknown until the lower languages are studied, and it is probable that more light will be thrown upon the former by a study of the latter than by more extended research in the higher.

The vast field of unwritten languages has been explored but not surveyed. In a general way it is known that there are many such languages, and the geographic distribution of the tribes of men who speak them is known, but scholars have just begun the study of the languages.

That the knowledge of the simple and uncompounded must precede the knowledge of the complex and compounded, that the latter may be rightly explained, is an axiom well recognized in biology, and it applies equally well to philology. Hence any system of philology, as the term is here used, made from a survey of the higher languages exclusively, will probably be a failure. "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature," and which of you by taking thought can add the antecedent phenomena necessary to an explanation of the language of Plato or of Spencer?

The study of astronomy, geology, physics, and biology, is in the hands of scientific men; objective methods of research are employed and metaphysic disquisitions find no place in the accepted philosophies; but to a large extent philology remains in the hands of the metaphysicians, and subjective methods of thought are used in the explanation of the phenomena observed. If philology is to be a science it must have an objective philosophy composed of a homologic classification and orderly arrangement of the phenomena of the languages of the globe.

Philologic research began with the definite purpose in view to discover in the diversities of language among the peoples of the earth a common element from which they were all supposed to have been derived, an original speech, the parent of all languages. In this philologists had great hopes of success at one time, encouraged by the discovery of the relation between the diverse branches of the Aryan stock, but in this very work methods of research were developed and doctrines established by which unexpected results were reached.

Instead of relegating the languages that had before been unclassified to the Aryan family, new families or stocks were discovered, and this process has been carried on from year to year until scores or even hundreds, of families are recognized, and until we may reasonably conclude that there was no single primitive speech common to mankind, but that man had multiplied and spread throughout the habitable earth anterior to the development of organized languages; that is, languages have sprung from innumerable sources after the dispersion of mankind.