psychotheistic

Updated: May 25, 2025

But the verity of that stage of philosophy does not rest alone upon the evidence derived from the study of fossil philosophies through the science of philology. In the folk-lore of every civilized people having a psychotheistic philosophy, an earlier philosophy with nature-gods is discovered.

John Wesley Powell - Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians: First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881, pages 17-56

Having discovered this, with a vast accumulation of evidence, we are enabled to carry philosophy back one stage beyond physitheism, and we can confidently assert that all the philosophies of civilization have come up through these three stages. And yet, there are fragments of philosophy discovered which are not zoötheistic, physitheistic, nor psychotheistic. What are they?

John Wesley Powell - Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians: First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881, pages 17-56

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.

John Wesley Powell - Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians: First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881, pages 17-56