Canadians, philosophy of the. We owe our knowledge of the savages of Canada to Baron de la Hontan who lived among them for about ten years. In his account he reports some conversations concerning religion which he had with one of these savages. It appears that the baron did not always come off best in the argument. What is surprising is to see a Huron misuse the weapons of our dialectic with sufficient subtlety to battle with the Christian religion. Abstractions and scholastic vocabulary are almost as familiar to him as to a European who had meditated on the books of Duns Scotus. This has led to the suspicion that Baron de la Hontan wanted to cover with ridicule the religion in which he had been brought up, and that he placed in the mouth of a savage arguments he did not dare advance himself.

Most of those who have neither seen nor heard about savages have imagined them covered with hair, living unsociably in the woods like animals, and having only a partial likeness to human beings. It even seems that most men still have this conception. Yet with the exception of the hair on their head and their eyebrows—which many carefully pull out—the savages have no hair on their body. If perchance some should grow they would tear it out by the roots. They are born white like us but become tanned because they are naked, grease themselves with oils, and paint themselves with various colors which over the years the sun burns into their skin. They are tall, taller than we, have very regular features with aquiline noses, and in general are well proportioned. Rarely is one seen who limps, is one-eyed, hunchbacked, blind, etc.

The first impression made by these savages is necessarily unfavorable because their eyes look fierce, their behavior is uncouth, and their manner of address so simple and reserved that a European who does not know them would find it difficult to believe that this behavior represents a kind of politeness after their fashion, a politeness whose conventions they keep among themselves as strictly as we keep ours, which they find quite ridiculous. They are not particularly outgoing and scarcely show their feelings, yet they are kind and affable, and toward foreigners and unfortunates they practice a charitable hospitality that puts all the nations of Europe to shame. They have a rather lively imagination, they exercise good judgment in dealing with their own affairs and pursue their goals with self-assurance. They are self-possessed in their actions and show a calm that would wear out our patience. Their sense of honor and their greatness of soul rarely allow them to get angry. They are high-minded and proud, their courage is unshakable, their valor intrepid, their steadfastness under pain seems to go beyond heroism, and they have a steadiness of soul that neither adversity nor good fortune can disturb.

All these fine qualities would be only too worthy of our admiration if they were not accompanied by many faults. They are fickle and unreliable, indescribably lazy, exceedingly lacking in gratitude, mistrustful, treacherous, vindictive, and all the more dangerous because they know so well how to hide their resentment and can harbor it for such a long time. They practice such unheard-of cruelties on their enemies that their inventiveness in torture exceeds the greatest cruelties related in the histories of the tyrants of old. They are brutish in their pleasures, they are vicious because of both ignorance and malice, yet their primitive way of life and their extreme poverty give them one advantage over us: they are quite ignorant of the refinements of vice, which luxury and affluence have introduced among us. Now we shall turn to the essentials of their philosophy and their religion.

1. All savages maintain there is a God. They prove His existence by the composition of the universe, which makes manifest the all-powerfulness of its creator. Thus it follows, they say, that man was not made by chance but is the work of a principle which is superior in wisdom and knowledge and which they call the Great Spirit. This Great Spirit contains everything, it appears in everything, it acts in everything, and it moves all things. All that we see and conceive is this God. He exists without bounds, limits, or body and must not be represented as an old man or as any other thing, however beautiful and vast it may be. Hence the savages adore Him in everything that appears in the world. So true is this that whenever they see something that is beautiful, strange, and surprising, especially the sun and the other stars, they exclaim, "Oh Great Spirit, we see you everywhere!"

2. They say that the soul is immortal, for if it were not, all men would be equally happy in this life. Since God is infinitely perfect and infinitely wise He could not have created some men to be happy and others to be unhappy. They maintain, therefore, that God, in a way that our reason cannot understand, wants a certain number of His creatures to suffer in this world in order that He may recompense them for it in the next. Hence they cannot accept the fact that Christians call a man unfortunate for having been killed, burned, etc.; and they maintain that what we call misfortune is a misfortune only in our way of thinking, since everything happens according to the will of that infinitely perfect being whose actions are neither whimsical nor arbitrary. These ideas are not so savage.

3. The Great Spirit has endowed men with reason to enable them to distinguish good from evil and to follow the rules of justice and wisdom.

4. Tranquillity of the soul is infinitely pleasing to this Great Spirit, while on the other hand He detests the tumult of the passions that renders men wicked.

5. Life is a dream and death an awakening by which we gain understanding of the visible and the invisible.

6. Because man's reason cannot rise high enough to gain knowledge of the supraterrestrial, it is useless and even harmful to attempt to discover the invisible.

7. After our death our souls go to a certain place. We cannot tell whether the good are happy there and the wicked suffer, because we do not know whether the Great Spirit conceives happiness and suffering as we do.