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Brinton, Daniel Garrison, 1837-1899

"The Myths of the New World A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America"

"
This last expression leads to another train of thought. As the
philosopher, pondering on the workings of self-consciousness, recognizes
that various pathways lead up to God, so the primitive man, in forming
his language, sometimes trod one, sometimes another. Whatever else
sceptics have questioned, no one has yet presumed to doubt that if a God
and a soul exist at all, they are of like essence. This firm belief has
left its impress on language in the names devised to express the
supernal, the spiritual world. If we seek hints from languages more
familiar to us than the tongues of the Indians, and take for example
this word _spiritual_; we find it is from the Latin _spirare_, to blow,
to breathe. If in Latin again we look for the derivation of _animus_,
the mind, _anima_, the soul, they point to the Greek _anemos_, wind, and
_aemi_, to blow. In Greek the words for soul or spirit, _psuche_,
_pneuma_, _thumos_, all are directly from verbal roots expressing the
motion of the wind or the breath.


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