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