A generation with every nerve strained by the war will probably have
little patience with a statement that the generation whose activities
began soon after the middle of the last century, went through a conflict
of perhaps equal importance, but such is the fact.
Like the present conflict, that was one between an old and firmly rooted
principle that had outlived most of its usefulness and was fettering
liberty, and a new principle that meant emancipation.
The contest was between the superstition (it was not consistent enough
to justify calling it an opinion) on the one hand that man has fallen
from a condition of primitive perfection to one of degradation, and on
the other hand, the scientific demonstration that man's experience has
been one of virtually constant progress, up from protoplasm and probably
from inorganic matter. On the former view hung the mass of putrescent
and pestilent dogma that had fastened itself upon the sweet and simple
teachings of Christ.
The conflict was probably the greatest of all between truth and
superstition. The temper of it was perhaps most strikingly illustrated
when, at the meeting of the British Association in 1860, Bishop
Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was "through his grandfather or his
grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey," and Huxley answered:
"I asserted--and I repeat--that a man has no reason to be ashamed of
having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I
should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man--a man of
restless and versatile intellect--who not content with success in his
own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he
has no real acquaintance, only to obscure by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."
A witness says: "The effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to
be carried out; I, for one jumped from my seat."
Another witness says: "I never saw such a display of fierce party
spirit," and speaks of "the looks of bitter hatred" cast upon those who
were on Huxley's side.
Perhaps it is not trying to shape great complexities too definitely, to
say that the conflict of which that was one episode, was the third of
the civilized world's greatest intellectual struggles--the establishment
of the Christian church, the reformation of it, and the determination of
its true relation to the progress of knowledge.
The last conflict, however, was a most hopeful illustration of the
progress made since the first two, in that it involved no exposure of
victims to the lions of the arena, no Nero's torches, no Inquisition, no
Thirty-Years' War, no destruction of venerable and beautiful monuments,
or of institutions for charity or education.
But of course that conflict of the last century, like all others, had
its pains; yet as it did not directly touch the person or the pocket of
the average man, he cared very little about it. Nevertheless it has
filtered down into his very language, and when he is the sort of average
man who likes to use big words, his share of the victors' spoils
includes the pleasure of frequently uttering, without quite
understanding, such terms as _environment_, _differentiation_, and even
_integration_, while the word _evolution_ has become such a
matter-of-course term that he and everybody else use it
unconsciously--unconscious not only of most of what it implies, but even
of their indebtedness to the men from whom they got it.[2]
[2] In this connection there was something said about
Herbert Spencer in our Number 16.
Of those men, one of the most important, and far the most important in
America, was John Fiske. The recent publication of his _Life and
Letters, by John S. Clarke_, (Houghton-Mifflin Co.) gives occasion to
say something about him and his part in the great conflict.
But first a word regarding the book. It is certainly a remarkable
production for a man well over eighty. Though not entirely free from the
diffuseness and repetition of age, it is nearer free than many
respectable books of much younger men, while in faithfulness, patience
and, on the whole, discrimination, it surpasses most. The author really
understands the implications of Evolution, so far as yet worked out, and
that is something that surprisingly few people do; and there are not a
few places where he states them with a clearness and vigor which would
do credit to anybody, and in a man of his years are no less than
astonishing. Whatever imperfections the book may have, as a guide for
the layman to the great revolution in thought which brought thought for
the first time into stable equilibrium, the book is probably surpassed
by no writing except Fiske's own.
But while the author's work is not to be estimated lightly, he would be
the first to say that the charm and value of the book are mainly in
Fiske's letters, especially those to his wife and mother, which in
naturalness, vividness, beauty of expression and humor are unsurpassed,
and in wealth and ease of illustrative learning are unequaled, by any
letters of which we know. For readers fond of books of travel, many of
them will be of the very highest interest. Moreover they include a fine
portrait gallery of the greatest men who won the fight for Evolution, at
play as well as at work; and the letters to and from Darwin, Spencer,
and a few others are rich in discussion of the profoundest topics that
have engaged the human mind. In short, we know of no other book which
admits the reader to as much intimacy with as high society. Jenkins
would not agree with our terms, but if high society means the men who
made the greatest intellectual epoch in human history, our assertion is
safe. Fiske himself had no small part in that great feat, and this book
admits us into his intimate friendship with Lyell, Lewes, George Eliot,
Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer and not a few others among the leaders
of the race. It seems quite probable that this life of Fiske may give a
clearer idea of Spencer than is given in Mr. Duncan's _Life_, or even in
the _Autobiography_. Perhaps best of all, Fiske's letters set before us
as example a character of rare simplicity, sincerity and tenderness.
Lest all this praise lead some to disappointment, we hasten to add the
obvious fact that the attractions of cotemporary history or even of
portable epigram, which have made most of the immortal letters in
literature, are hardly to be expected from a writer whose mind was
generally absorbed in the widest generalizations of Philosophy and the
History of the past.
* * * * *
And now as to the life itself:
Edmund Fisk Green, later famous as John Fiske, was born of excellent New
England stock at Hartford, Connecticut, on March 30, 1842. His mother
was early widowed, and went to New York to teach, leaving her son with
her mother in Middletown. When he was thirteen, his mother married in
New York, and this change in her surname probably has something to do
with the change in his, to that originally borne by the grandmother with
whom he continued to live. The grandmother's father, John Fisk, was a
remarkable man, and so his Christian name went with the surname.
The young John Fiske (the _e_ was his own addition when he found that it
had been used by his earlier ancestors) was precocious, as, despite many
assertions to the contrary, great scholars and geniuses generally have
been; but unlike Mill and Spencer--the cotemporaries he nearest
resembled--Fiske had not the benefit in his early education of any
exceptionally competent guide. From childhood up, however, he stood out
from his companions.
He had the usual schooling, interspersed with some special tutoring, and
during two considerable intervals he pursued his studies unaided. All
the while that his formal studies were going on, he read ravenously,
and, from a very early age, only things worth reading. Thus in childhood
he began the accumulation of what became a very exceptional private
library.
When Fiske was fourteen, he joined the Congregational Church in
Middletown, and for a time he was very religious indeed, taking an
active part in the wave of "revival" which swept over the country two
years later, in 1858. But early in 1859 he was reading Gibbon, Grote,
Humboldt, and Buckle, and questioning the dogmas of Christianity, and
quite probably was going through the reaction from the "revival," which,
throughout the country, was about as great as the revival itself; and it
was not long before Fiske abandoned the dogmas altogether. But his
reverence for all in the religion that was worth the attention of a
reasoning being, never left him; and through life he even used its
terminology to a degree that was sometimes hardly consistent with his
fundamental convictions. He became also far the most effective builder
yet known of the new religious superstructure legitimately based on the
philosophy which, at about the time we speak of, was removing from many
minds the traditional bases of religion.
Fiske's infidelity led to his social ostracism in Middletown, but forty
years later, the place had so far advanced that when it celebrated the
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, it invited Fiske
to be the orator of the occasion.
In 1860 he entered Harvard.
Later, of Darwin he said: "There is now and then a mind--perhaps one in
four or five millions--which in early youth thinks the thoughts of
mature manhood." Such a mind was emphatically Fiske's own: while he was
still an undergraduate, two of his essays attracted attention on both
sides of the water.
In college his marks in Philosophy were low: he knew more than his
teachers did, and differed with them, and probably with his textbooks.
He was threatened with expulsion from college for disseminating among
the students seditious ideas, including the doctrine of Evolution. Eight
years later he was invited to expound the same ideas in a course of
lectures in one of the chapels of the university.
A third instance of the revolution in opinion which marked the last
century was the refusal, in 1872, because of Fiske's unorthodoxy, to
invite him to lecture at the Lowell Institute, which was followed less
than twenty years later by invitations to do it. Then the demand for
seats was so great that the evening lectures had to be repeated in
subsequent afternoons.
After graduation, Fiske studied law, did two years' work in nine months,
passed a triumphant examination, and was admitted to the Bar. But after
waiting for clients two years, during which he read more, in quantity
and quality, than most fairly studious men read in a lifetime, and wrote
several notable essays, he gave up law for the pursuits in which he was
already eminent.
But though he gave up the law, nearly eighteen years later he could
write thus to his wife (_Life and Letters_, II, p. 205):
"Judge Gantt thought he would stick me, and so propounded to me the
barbarous law-Latin puzzle propounded by Sir Thomas More to a learned
jurist at Amsterdam, 'whether a plough taken _in withernam_ can be
replevied?' Didn't stick Hezekiah [The author does not give us the
origin of this nickname] _not much_. I gave him a minute account of the
ancient process of distraining and impounding and of the action of
replevin,--considerably to my own amusement and his astonishment."
The conceptions of the Universe generally held at the time when Fiske
was in college were fragmentary and chaotic, each phenomenon or each
group of phenomena being, like language, a special creation of an
anthropomorphic God, turning out different jobs piecemeal like a man.
The conception of one power behind all had been a dream of not a few
philosophers and poets, but as a fact comprehensible by the average
mind, it was not known until the discovery of the Conservation of Force
about 1860. About the same time was discovered the unity of all organic
life, in its descent from protoplasm, and the identity of its forces
with those of the inorganic universe. The nebular cosmogony, the
persistence of force and the biologic genesis, united together, showed
the power evolving, sustaining and carrying on the entire universe known
to us, to be _one_, and constantly acting in unified process; and that
every detail--from the most minute known to the chemist, physicist and
biologist, up to the greatest known to the geologist and astronomer, and
including all known to the psychologist, economist, and historian--was
caused by a previous detail. It having been established that the same
causes always produced the same results, these uniformities were
recognized as Laws, and it was also recognized that conduct in
conformity with these laws produced good, and conduct counter to them
produced evil.
It became plain, too, to all normal minds, that the only conceivable
object of these processes was the production of happiness, and that all
records of them proved that they tend not only to produce happiness, but
to increase it.
These facts rendered entirely superfluous all the previous imaginings of
anthropomorphic deities issuing commands, to obey which was good, and to
disobey which was bad. For all that, was substituted a beneficent Power
transcending man's complete comprehension, but with infinitely greater
claims to gratitude and reverence, and sanctions for morality infinitely
more intelligible and authoritative.
These great discoveries were at once grasped by Fiske's great
intelligence, and welcomed with enthusiasm. To their dissemination he
mainly devoted his next twenty years, and to their illustration in the
origins and foundation of our national commonwealth, the rest of his
career.
In explanation of this ordering of his interests, he said that he always
had had a predilection for History, but that a man who needs a
philosophy must get it fixed before he can properly do anything else. It
is to be presumed, however, that he was also attracted to Philosophy by
the fight for Evolution, by his intimacy with Youmans and Spencer, and
perhaps most of all, by the appeal to a mind that, in spite of his
enjoyment of the good things of life, was at bottom profoundly
religious. All this involved his strong conviction of the need of
building up the religious implications of Evolution, to take the place
of the old sanctions which, in many minds, Evolution had set aside.
Fiske also contributed one generalization to our knowledge of biologic
evolution, and that is a good deal for any man to do: many have attained
fame for less. It was a generalization so important that Darwin
regretted not having developed it himself. The contribution was, as most
of our readers know, regarding the effect of long infancy upon psychic,
and hence upon social, development. The reasons, when suggested, are as
obvious as Columbus's egg: they are, of course, the aid to the evolution
of the family and of altruism.
When, after Fiske had done his best on these themes, and Evolution in
History became the study of his life, in that work he was a pioneer, and
probably as well fitted for it as any man that ever lived. His cutting
off in the midst of his plans, before he was sixty, was one of those
disasters and apparent wastes which are among the great puzzles of the
Universe.
* * * * *
Nowadays the man in the street would expect that in Ireland the
frequency of marriage would vary inversely with the price of potatoes,
and the frequency of illegitimacy would vary directly with it,--that in
France, or anywhere else, the ratio of unstamped letters dropped into
the boxes, to those duly stamped, would be the same year in and year
out; in other words, that the conduct of men in general is regulated by
environment and determined by law. But when Fiske was in college, and
these ideas were new, as far as anything can be new, and when Buckle
brought out a book full of them and their supporting facts, they
appealed at once to Fiske's exceptional powers of correlation--of
tracing order in the history he had been reading, and in the life he was
beginning intelligently to observe. The precocious boy's enthusiasm was
greatly stirred, and yet his critical faculty did not lose its
discrimination. He wrote an essay on Buckle which was praised by the
best judges in England; and when Spencer came along sweeping all these
ideas into the one colossal generalization of Evolution, Fiske was wild
with delight. His own studies of language had been wide enough to enable
him to apply to it the new generalization, and he wrote an essay on _The
Evolution of Language_ which increased the effect of his Buckle essay on
both sides of the Atlantic, and received the commendation of several
leading men, including Spencer himself. How much in advance of the age
these ideas then were, is well illustrated by the fact that somewhere
about 1860, some of the authorities at Yale actually set the students,
who were not Fiske's, as a theme for discussion: "Is language of divine
or human origin?" This theme was not set by Whitney: he already knew
better, and was very much out of gear with Yale because of the
knowledge, though as far as his colleagues were concerned, he kept his
out-of-gearness to himself.
* * * * *
Fiske was never absorbingly interested in the specific problems of the
elevation of the less fortunate portion of mankind, but the wider
philosophic and historic problems to which he was devoted include those
specific ones. The widest of all, of course, is Evolution, and probably
he did more to diffuse a knowledge of that than any man of his time
except its two greatest discoverers. Had he lived to apply, as he
proposed, the all-comprehending law to the history of our nation from
the time it became one at Washington's inauguration, his help in the
perplexities which now, next to the war, most beset us, would have been
invaluable. But what he did live to accomplish is of a value that
probably none of us can realize, and not many even suspect.
The fundamental policy indicated by the law of Evolution is: Build on
what you have. Next to the family, the one institution on which
civilization rests is the right of private property--the opportunity of
every man to obtain and hold it. The growth of this right made the
advance from slavery and feudalism. Owing to the great difference in
men's capacities, its present most marked attainment is capitalism, but
with the gradual development of men's capacities, especially as promoted
by the spread of education, capitalism seems destined to evolve into
cooeperation, of which the germs are already manifest in the
savings-banks and stock companies, especially the avowedly cooeperative
companies whose special development has been in England. The only
legitimate and permanent source of private property is production. The
robbery of Russian landholders or American manufacturers to confer the
semblance of property rights on the incapable, is not evolution, and can
have no permanent results. In all such proceedings, the property has
soon disappeared, or found its way back to the capable. Such processes
are catastrophic: the only successful ones have been evolutionary. The
general realization of this would probably do more to settle the
irrepressible conflict between the haves and the have-nots than any
other purely intellectual agency now within sight. While the word
Evolution is on everybody's tongue, men whose thinking is saturated
through and through by a realization of the law, do not abound. If they
did, there would not be so many Bolsheviks, and Russia would still be in
her place with the allies.
One of the most important causes of the war which Germany is waging
against civilization, is her imperfect grasp of the philosophy of
Evolution, and one reason for her imperfect grasp is the scarcity of men
like Fiske. The doctrine that the fittest should and must survive is
sound. Germany's doctrine that she is the fittest, is not: for it makes
the tests of fitness brute force, cunning and unscrupulousness, and
ignores the fact that the course of Evolution has brought into the world
such forces as love of justice, sympathy, the cooeperative spirit, and
altruism. Whether these qualities are yet so far evolved as to be the
fittest to survive, is being tested by the conflict now going on. If
Germany proves herself fittest to survive, it will be proved only that
although the other qualities control in many advanced places, the time
for the world's control by them is not yet come. If the Allies conquer,
it will be proved that that time is already here.
In a rough way it may be said that Spencer, in restricting himself to
demonstrating so much of evolution as could be expressed in terms of
Matter and Motion, left open too much opportunity for the German
conception that evolution stops at the point where those terms stop; and
it can be said, with equally rough justice, that the philosopher who, up
to this time, has traced the law farthest beyond that point, was Fiske.
* * * * *
Spencer said in a letter to Fiske, February 2, 1870 (_Life_, I, 368. The
italics are apparently the biographer's. We condense a little.):
"The deanthropomorphization of men's conceptions has never occupied any
conspicuous or distinctive place in my own mind--_they have been all
along quite secondary to the grand doctrine of Evolution from a physical
point of view_. As I originally conceived it, 'First Principles' was
what now forms its second part. I subsequently saw the need for Part I
(The Unknowable) _simply for the purpose of guarding myself against the
charges of atheism and materialism_. I consider it ['The Synthetic
Philosophy'] as essentially a Cosmogony that admits of being worked out
in physical terms, without necessarily entering upon any metaphysical
questions, and without committing myself to any particular form of
philosophy commonly so called. My _sole original purpose_ was the
interpretation of all concrete phenomena in terms of Matter and Motion,
and I regard all other purposes as incidental and secondary."
Spencer would not go out of reach of experiment--at least collateral
experiment, but Fiske went into intuition freely. Spencer avoided the
labyrinth altogether, Fiske went into it boldly, but always kept within
reach of the clue of experience.
But those who do not already know the contrary, should not infer from
this that Spencer ignored the field of Ethics. Quite the reverse: he
made probably the most important scientific contributions to that field
yet made, in tracing the evolution of the conduct of sentient beings
from its first manifestations in reflex action, in the avoidance of
danger, and the procuring of food, through the seeking of mates, the
care of offspring, the forming of groups, up to the highest development
of personal and social relations and the moralities therein involved.
But for one person who has read Spencer's _Ethics_, a hundred, probably
a thousand, have read his work in the unmoral fields, and tens of
thousands have their ideas of Evolution restricted to the fields
explored by Darwin and Haeckel, and in those fields it is the brute and
the Prussian that survive. But civilization grows in other fields.
Although Fiske was as thoroughly convinced of Evolution as Spencer was,
he did not stop at its demonstration within the limits which Spencer
imposed upon himself, but followed it into the fields of the spirit, as
illustrated by the titles of some of his essays: _The Idea of God_,
_Through Nature to God_, _Life Everlasting_, _The Origin of Evil_, _The
Unseen World_.
When, in the fifties and sixties, Science abolished the anthropomorphic
limitations of the Creator, it did not stop there, but abolished, for
the time being, _all_ the anthropomorphic qualities, including those
that have not necessarily any limitations at all. While the universe,
despite frequent inadequacy, disproportion and catastrophe, still
abounds in obvious beauty and happiness, Science for a time shut its
eyes to beneficence, and denied benevolence and even purpose. Fiske did
more than anybody else has yet done to restore them--to show that they
are corollaries of Evolution. He said, in his _Cosmic Philosophy_: "The
process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology of
which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantest rudiments."
He did more just there than any modern philosopher, perhaps than any
philosopher, to show that this teleology is beneficent, and so to
restore the attitude of mind which it may not yet be too late to call
Faith in God and Immortality.
This attitude of mind, however, has received some impetus from new
phenomena now open to Psychical Research, but hardly yet as much new
impetus as the old one Fiske gave it with more limited materials.
The following passages indicate in brief what Fiske gave at length in
his _Idea of God_, _Destiny of Man_, _Origin of Evil_ and kindred
writings. Contrast them with the quotation from Spencer a page or two
back: This is the closing passage of _The Unseen World_.
"We must think with the symbols with which experience has furnished us;
and when we so think, there does seem to be little that is even
intellectually satisfying in the awful picture which science shows us,
of giant worlds concentrating out of nebulous vapour, developing with
prodigious waste of energy into theatres of all that is grand and sacred
in spiritual endeavour, clashing and exploding again into dead-vapour
balls, only to renew the same toilful process without end--a senseless
bubble-play of Titan forces, with life, love, and aspiration brought
forth only to be extinguished. The human mind, however 'scientific' its
training, must often recoil from the conclusion that this is all; and
there are moments when one passionately feels that this cannot be all.
On warm June mornings, in green country lanes, with sweet pine odours
wafted in the breeze which sighs through the branches, and cloud-shadows
flitting over far-off blue mountains, while little birds sing their
love-songs and golden-haired children weave garlands of wild roses; or
when in the solemn twilight we listen to wondrous harmonies of Beethoven
and Chopin that stir the heart like voices from an unseen world; at such
times one feels that the profoundest answer which science can give to
our questioning is but a superficial answer after all. At these moments,
when the world seems fullest of beauty, one feels most strongly that it
is but the harbinger of something else--that the ceaseless play of
phenomena is no mere sport of Titans, but an orderly scene, with its
reason for existing in
One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."
And the following from a letter to his mother:
"My chief comfort in affliction would be the recognition that there is a
Supreme Power manifested in the totality of phenomena, the workings of
which are not like the workings of our intelligence, but far above and
beyond them, and which are obviously tending to some grand and worthy
result, even though my individual happiness gets crushed in the process,
so that the only proper mental attitude for me, is that which says: 'not
my will but thine be done.'"
And this on Immortality (_Life and Letters_, II, 317):
"The materialistic assumption that the life of the soul ends with the
life of the body is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless
assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for
it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life
we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot
discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always
prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul's
survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of
proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible.
With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist
transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who
sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of
gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for
either view."
On this his biographer justly comments:
"This positive statement will be more seriously questioned now than at
the time when Fiske wrote. The many able investigators engaged in
probing scientifically the mysteries of psychical phenomena, are
bringing forth a mass of evidence which goes to show the presence of a
form of existence which transcends mere physical existence."
And as showing Fiske's attitude toward the religion around him, his
biographer says:
"In Fiske's mind Christianity was the mightiest drama in human
civilization: it was his rare gift that he could appreciate it with the
feeling of the poet as well as with the critical judgment of the
philosopher."
The passages quoted will seem almost pathetically limited, in view of
the new phenomena of mind which, whether they be or be not found to
demonstrate for our souls a longer existence than experience has ever
demonstrated before, unquestionably already demonstrate for them a wider
scope.
* * * * *
It has not been more than a couple of years since a leading American
author, whose work has often ornamented the pages of the UNPOPULAR
REVIEW, said: "I hate the very name of Evolution." This was because
Spencer traced the law no farther than it could be expressed in terms of
Matter and Motion, and our friend was a profound student of the Greek
and Oriental imaginings which try to transcend all that can be expressed
in those terms.
And yet a few years before, the same scholar was one of the earliest
students in this country of M. Bergson--the Bergson to whom a friend
lately said: "People run after you because you have covered the colossal
forbidding structure raised by Darwin and Spencer, with flowers." "No,"
said Bergson, "I have shown that the flowers necessarily grow out of
it."
The paradoxical student of Bergson, who did not see these flowers, has
since grown to a better realization of them, and of the Law of
Evolution. He lately said that he was tracing the course of thought from
Plato to Christ, and when his companion remarked: "Oh! You're writing on
the evolution of the Christian religion," he admitted the soft
impeachment. But what Bergson did not do for him, has been partly done,
though indirectly, as the same thing has been done for the world more
than by any other man, by Fiske.
President Butler once said that Philosophy begins where Spencer left
off. But he did not say, and could not justly say, that it begins beyond
regions whither Spencer pointed the way. In fact he was not just in
saying that Spencer's generalizations, in the regions to which he
confined them, were not Philosophy, or that there was any real break
between those regions and the regions beyond, where they were carried by
Fiske, or even the regions still farther beyond where, whatever may be
the outcome, they are now being carried by students given to legitimate
Psychical Research. Spencer was too early for the movement into the
latter, and as to his relations with the former, Fiske well says
(_Evolution and Religion_, p. 277):
"There are some people who seem to think that it is not enough that Mr.
Spencer should have made all these priceless contributions to human
knowledge, but actually complain of him for not giving us a complete and
exhaustive system of theology into the bargain."
Yet Spencer, though he restrained himself from transcendental
speculations regarding Evolution, was by no means insensible to them
when made by others. Some readers not altogether unfamiliar with Emerson
will be surprised at the collection made by Fiske's biographer, of
Emerson's inspirations regarding Evolution, especially as they were
given on an almost negligible knowledge of the scientific development of
the law. Spencer appreciated them so highly that among his few American
pilgrimages was one to Concord, and this despite Spencer's distrust of
intuition, and Emerson's faith in it.
By some even modern thinkers Intuition is boldly claimed to be an
instrument of research; by others its very existence, outside of morbid
imagination, is denied, and the only legitimate instrument of research
is declared to be observation verified by experiment that can be
repeated at will. The truth, as usual in controversy, includes both
statements, and is covered by neither. Creatures with rudimentary eyes
and ears must have "intuitions" of colors and sounds beyond their
capacity of clear apprehension; and even our eyes, which must be
rudimentary compared with possible eyes, have in regard to even our
spectrum, intuitions, some of which have recently been made clearer by
the photograph and the X-ray. These cleared-up intuitions are now added
to positive knowledge. Intuition is here proved an instrument of
research, and it is one in every discovery. But until verified by
experiment, it is not a _reliable_ instrument of research: for what
seems to be intuition is often mistaken, and is generally so vague as to
be subject of conflicting opinions, and hence of conflicting action.
Moreover, as the subjects of intuition are beyond our knowledge,
intuitions are often held to be superior to knowledge, and worthy of
greater enthusiasm. Consequently conflicting opinions regarding
intuitions have probably led to more tragedies than any other blunder.
There is no intuition more nearly universal than that of the immortality
of the soul. But even so devout a man as Fiske pronounced it
unverifiable, and it is so uncertain that all sorts of conflicting
dogmas have grown up around it, until it has led not only to the
self-immolations of India and the human sacrifices of Mexico, but to the
Arena of Nero, the inquisition of Torquemada, the Thirty Years' War, and
even within the memory of living men, the agonizing rupture of many a
family.
Fiske did more, through deductions from the law of Evolution, toward
putting this most important of intuitions upon the basis of established
knowledge, than any man had done before him. He did this not only in his
writings on _The Idea of God_, _Through Nature to God_, and _The Destiny
of Man_, but in the whole tendency of his work, not only when expounding
the Law of Evolution as Philosophy, but in tracing it through History.
In this particular he was in advance of his great compeers in his own
department: for he did not hesitate, as Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley did,
to deal with the intuitions of his time. Such intuitions as are true
being necessarily in advance of knowledge, there is danger of assuming
to be true some that are not. This danger kept Huxley almost entirely
away from them, and Spencer farther away than any other great
philosopher. It was this abstention, certainly excusable and probably
justifiable in one who prefers it, that makes his philosophy hated, and
prevents its being even studied, not to say understood, by those who
love the quagmires and mirages built up by mistaken intuition.
That essential instrument of research--invaluable, despite all its
dangers--Fiske estimated more broadly and _justly_ than, perhaps, any
other philosopher, certainly than his great master. This makes it
singularly pathetic that his premature death should have cut him off
from the investigations which have seemed to many leading minds to point
to a verification--even to have reached a verification, of the greatest
as well as the widest intuition of the ages. If he has risen to a
bird's-eye view, or more probably a teloptic consciousness, of what is
going on here, it must amuse and cheer him to see that the psychical
researchers are not persecuted as the evolutionists were--as he himself
was in his youth, but are at worst merely laughed at as a set of
inoffensive idiots. Balfour, Crookes, Lodge, and Barrett are among them,
and James, Hodgson, Myers, and Sidgwick are passed from among them; and
we believe that Fiske and even Spencer, had their lot been cast in these
days, would be among the most interested of them.
* * * * *
We were on the brink of writing that probably most of the readers of
this essay will have heard some of those unprecedented lectures and
addresses on American History delivered by Fiske during his last twenty
years. But we were startled by the realization that almost another
twenty years have elapsed since the last of those lectures was
delivered, and that a large proportion of our readers were then too
young to be interested in them. Some readers perhaps even need to be
told that Fiske was the first eminent historian who had a clear
conception of the Law of Evolution--so far as a clear conception was
then, or is perhaps even now, possible. But his historical works
containing those lectures are so well known that it would be as nearly
superfluous as it is impracticable to descant upon them here. Though
they were published irregularly, they make a continuous narrative from
the influences leading to the discovery of America, down to the
inauguration of Washington; and many high authorities give them the very
first rank, and declare that the author's premature death before
bringing them down to his own time is a great loss to the world.
Some of his historical lectures were delivered to "the very cream of
London," as Huxley said, and to the unbounded enthusiasm of one of them,
regarding whom Fiske wrote his wife:
"Spencer said after the lecture, that he was surprised at the tremendous
grasp I had on the whole field of History and the art with which I used
such a wealth of materials. Said I had given him new ideas of Sociology,
and that if I would stick to History, I could go beyond anything ever
yet done. Said still more: I never saw Spencer warm up so. I said I
didn't really dream when writing about American history that there could
be anything so new about it. 'Well,' said Spencer, 'it _is_ new anyway:
you are opening a new world of reflections to me, and I shall come to
the rest of the lectures _to be taught_!'"
The estimation of Fiske's historical work in England is farther shown by
his having received an invitation, which he could not accept, to deliver
a long course of lectures at Oxford; and another, which he did accept
but died before he could fulfil, to represent America by an oration at
the millenary celebration in honor of King Alfred.
* * * * *
To appraise and compare the learning of great scholars is hardly
possible. Fiske was unquestionably one of the most learned of men. In
1863 he pronounced Spencer the most learned man living. I knew them both
pretty well, Fiske very well, and to my ignorant apprehension he always
seemed the more learned of the two. One thing stood out in the learning
of them both--so little of it was "useless knowledge." Many contend that
no such thing exists, their general lemma being: "You never can tell
when a bit of knowledge will come into play." But you attempt to tell
every time you seek a truth: you estimate its value as compared with
other truths that you might be seeking, and while you can know but a
minute portion of all that is known, you do, if you are in earnest, take
precious good care that your portion shall contain what you deem to be
of most worth. If you happen to have a genius for abstract speculation,
whose bearing on human happiness may be imperceptible, you indulge your
propensity, and justify yourself by the "You never can tell." But after
all, probably it will never be told, and the results of your
acquisitions may be as futile as those of the man generally called the
most erudite of our time, all of whose learning did not prevent his
maundering about "infallible authority" in a human brain, speaking
tolerantly of persecution; and writing "different to." Nor did it enable
him to produce any very great work, or give him a range of thought
materially wider than if he had lived six centuries earlier. Fiske's
erudition not only fortified his judgment, but was a basis for many
productions of great scope and importance.
Fiske wasted very little time on learning that led nowhere. He knew most
of the famous futilities generally called Philosophy, but he studied
them as a pathologist studies his morbid specimens--to learn and teach
what to avoid and how to cure. From his learning grew great and true and
useful thoughts, whereas from the learning of many great scholars grow
no thoughts at all.
He went to the root of the matter when he said (_Life and Letters_, I,
p. 255): "There are so many things to be learned, that at first sight
they may seem like a confused chaos. The different departments of
knowledge may appear so separate and conflicting, and yet so mingled and
interdependent, as to render it a matter of doubt where the beginning
should be made. But when we have come to a true philosophy, and make
_that_ our stand-point, all things become clear. We know what things to
learn, and what, in the infinite mass of things to leave unlearned--and
then the Universe becomes clear and harmonious."
Before the vastness of Fiske's knowledge was summed up in his biography,
even those who knew him best probably had a very inadequate idea of it.
The traditional "everything about something and something about
everything" is all that is conventionally expected from great scholars,
but Fiske probably came as near to knowing everything about everything
as any man ever did. He knew more about philosophy than most good
philosophers, more about history than most good historians, more about
biology than most good biologists, more about languages than most good
philologists, more about law than most good lawyers, and even more about
music than most good musicians. Not only had he studied more widely than
most of them, but he remembered with an ease and accuracy seldom
equalled. He said that if he ever read a fact in connection with a date,
the two were fixed together in his memory, and it was astonishing to
test him on such points. For instance, in December, 1898, he might say,
"You remember that on February 27, 1878, you wrote me so-and-so"; and
this, with him, was a mere matter of course.
His liberality and happy ingenuity in sharing his knowledge with his
friends were delightful. In many a talk into the small hours and even
into the dawn, Fiske did most of the talking; and yet in such a way that
nobody thought of his monopoly of it until afterwards.
Among the things that his biographer left out was that old black
meerschaum pipe of the late sixties and early seventies. It was an
equilateral triangle about two and a half inches on edge, cut from a
slab of meerschaum a little over an inch thick. It had a cherry stem
about a foot long. When Fiske got settled down, he would slowly pull the
bowl and the stem and the tobacco separately from some of the infinite
recesses of his person, and get them together and in operation, and then
heave one of his immense sighs of contentment, and be ready for
conversation. Yet there's a paradox in my recollections of this pipe.
I'm sure all those I have stated are correct, and yet at that time "the
recesses of his person" had hardly begun to approximate infinity, as
they afterwards did: amid all the impressions is one that he was rather
slight, but that must have had something to do with the thinnish beard
of the portrait before me as I write, which it is a pity was not put
into the biography.
He was the "broadest-minded" man I ever knew--most alive to the good
points of things he did not endorse. During his whole life his attitude
toward the religion which had persecuted him, was one of reverent but
discriminating affection.
* * * * *
Yet it is hardly fair to discourage readers, as it must be admitted
Fiske's biographer does, by leaving the implication that this
extraordinary creature was superhuman.
With all his colossal powers, he was not, perhaps fortunately for us,
what is usually called a genius: his conclusions were reasoned and
consistent, and his likes and dislikes reliable. But he had not that
intuitive power which leads a man like a bee in a quick straight line to
the essential thing, or to put vast accumulations of truth into
epigrams. He was enormously instructive and always entertaining, but he
was seldom suggestive. He dealt in food, rather than in condiments. He
had to plod to his conclusions in his irresistible elephantine way. To
get rid of Christian dogmatism, when the first page of the Westminster
Catechism is enough for some men, he had to read a library; and when he
was twenty-two, he wrote Spencer that he had "successively adopted and
rejected the system of almost every philosopher from Descartes to
Professor Ferrier."
He had his faults like the rest of us, but not as many mean ones as most
of us. He was hardly ever selfish or irritable or impatient: the
elephant bides his time, though he never forgets. But Fiske was better
than the elephant, in that he never harbored revenge. His few faults
were "childlike and bland," though, unlike those of the accepted
exemplar of those virtues, never deceitful, and to a great extent they
were forced upon him by circumstances, and of course were "faults of his
qualities"--of a mind that could not hold itself down to the business of
life. But take him by and large--and he was so very large--he was not
only a very great man, but a very good man. Yet he was not, nor was ever
anybody else, such a man as biographers necessarily depict if they write
while there are still living those whom the whole truth could hurt.
But our present biographer has not even brought out, except as they show
themselves by implication, some of Fiske's remarkable virtues. During an
acquaintance of very exceptional intimacy, I never heard him curse any
human being or speak of one with merciless hate. Of one who, he thought,
had injured him unjustifiably and cruelly, he generally made fun; of
another, who presented fewer temptations to burlesque, he often spoke
admiringly, and perhaps less often with a sarcasm doubly powerful
because judicial.
He had absolutely no pride of intellect: partly, perhaps, because from
childhood he naturally kept himself, by his chosen reading, in contact
with the greatest intellects, and so was never struck with the greatness
of his own. We had not been out of college long, and I had not made much
progress out of the average new A. B.'s worship of intellect, when, as
we were speaking of a common friend, I said something to the effect that
I wished he had more brains (I now suspect that he had more than I had)
when Fiske, who had more than both of us, made a few remarks, very kind
though very instructive, on the superiority to mere intellectual power,
of goodness, sympathy, and refinement. Once with a friend unknown to
fame, who seemed a mere pigmy beside him, he had had a long talk with
one of the world's greatest men, and Fiske was heard to say that he was
struck throughout by the fact that his obscure friend showed more
intelligence than _he_ did. The fact probably was that his friend's
intelligence really was quicker than the elephantine but irresistible
movements of Fiske's great mind. But Fiske did not think of his own
power, but only of the agility of his friend. The friend subsequently
said that he supposed he had understood all that was in the books of his
two companions, but he certainly did not understand all that was in
their talk--the talk in which Fiske had ascribed to himself the less
intelligence. Another illustration: many years ago, when Taine was on
the lips of all American readers, Fiske said: "He's a sort of big John
Fiske--a diffuser of other men's ideas, without ever having originated
an idea himself." Probably this was before Fiske had developed his own
idea, generally recognized as original, of the effect of long infancy in
evolving the higher qualities of a species.
Yet Fiske's distinction between finders and diffusers is not necessarily
as modest as, at first sight, it appears, and certainly not as simple.
Newton, Darwin, Spencer, and their kind undoubtedly form a very
respectable group, but so do St. Paul and all the great apostles of all
the faiths, not to speak of the historians. And on which side of the
line, if you run it through all writers, will you put Homer, Dante, and
Shakespear?
* * * * *
The world was never as full as it is just now of what pleases to
consider itself "advanced thinking." Some of it is advanced, and a
little of it is thinking; but most of it, all unknown to those who spout
it, has been exploded over and over again. As a mass, its quality is
such that one sometimes (but very rarely, it is to be feared) feels a
half-humorous self-distrust in propounding the share of it that one
believes in most. The risk has to be taken, however, and we venture to
state what seem to us some of the profoundest and most important of our
present views of the universe and man's relation to it, which, based
very largely on the discoveries of Darwin and Spencer, especially of
Spencer, Fiske, on the testimony of Darwin and Spencer themselves, did
more than any other man had then done, or we think has yet done, to
develop and disseminate. To extract them from his voluminous writings
and state them in his own language, with the brevity required here,
would be impossible. We have already said that he was not a maker of
epigrams: the sweep of his mind was too broad and slow. When he gave you
anything, he gave you the whole of it, because, strangely often, he knew
the whole of it, so far as anybody did; but he gave only its essentials:
he was never a bore.
The Law of Evolution contains nothing counter to the Moral Law: it only
changes the old sanctions of it. In the control of the universe, it
substitutes for an anthropomorphic, tinkering, and even "jealous" God, a
Law that varies not, and, despite terrible apparent exceptions, on the
whole makes for righteousness and for happiness. Even now, while most of
the world is steeped more than ever before in anxiety and grief, and
while scores of miles are covered with slaughter, the vast preponderance
of the earth's surface is covered with beauty, and the vast majority of
human beings are smiling. Moreover, the Law of Evolution indicates that
the favorable conditions are to increase for a period longer than we can
conceive, and then gradually and painlessly disappear, to be revived in
a new evolution.
The discovery of the Law of Evolution has already done much to solve the
mystery of evil. Catastrophism is a corollary of it: if there were no
imperfection there could be no advance. Evil comes from a lack of
balance between forces. When balance is disturbed--by anything from
indigestion in a protozoon up to a storm on the ocean where he lives,
there is a catastrophe. Evil is not a positive thing, but merely lack of
the good, or lack of proportion in the good--inadequacy or excess, the
excess being when a force or a passion good in itself exceeds the forces
that usually keep it within bounds--when one force of those that hold
the earth's crust in equilibrium becomes excessive, and there is
earthquake; when love of country seeks to expand it, at the expense of
other countries, and there is war; when the appetite that creates and
conserves property exceeds the respect for the rights of others, and
there is theft or robbery or even murder; when the passion that
perpetuates the race grows to excess, and its rightful result in the
family is prevented or destroyed, often with attendant deceit, violence,
murder.
When Rochefoucauld said: "Our virtues are most frequently but vices
disguised," he said an impossible thing, and spoke, as most proverb
makers do, from mere habit of paradox and love of it. He would have told
a fundamental truth, however, if he had said: Our vices are most
frequently but virtues disguised--by inflation.
But deeper in the individual soul than any of these problems, is one
that Evolution has as yet directly done little to clarify. In
substituting for Providence, a wisdom that (so far as our poor wits can
state the conditions) provided for the exigencies beforehand by Law,
instead of constantly handling them as they arise, Evolution raises the
question: How far down into the details of our lives does the law go? Of
all questions bearing upon our lives, there is but one deeper and more
anxious: Does the law work out for good as far as it goes? Perhaps the
answer can be settled only by experience, and judgment depends largely
on temperament. And yet experience has provided all thinking peoples
with expressions that assert a favorable solution. Job was not the first
to say: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." All literatures
abound in such expressions, as Pope's
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
(Never deny that it's as near right as it _can_ be.) And there are many
such expressions as Tennyson's
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
or as Paul's
Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
or Shakespear's
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
or Thomson's
From seeming evil still educing good,
or Emerson's
Every evil [has] its good.
If the intuitions of these men in advance of the race are not
foolishness, this matter must be regulated by some great
principle--perhaps some corollary of "the law of compensation," that has
been so generally guessed at--notably by Emerson, and which seems
closely akin to the Law of Equilibration, whose demonstration by Spencer
has no small claim to be considered the highest reach of the human mind.
Few men have given, or even recognized, an answer from their own
experience. Few men, even, live long enough for experience to give very
full indication. Whatever may be the egotism of obtruding here personal
experience on a point so intimate, I follow what in this connection
seems almost a duty, in stating the conviction of a very long life which
has known its share of shadow, that in the average man under average
circumstances the Divine Law does go down farther into the details of
our lives than we can realize, and there work out good from apparent
evil. Yet though the question as we stated it above, in terms of Law
instead of Providence, is not entirely new to thinkers, before the
latter part of the last century it had been as vague as had been the
conceptions of Evolution. It seems but yesterday, and it is with a start
that one realizes that this epoch is already superseded by one where the
range of mind must be mapped out anew, and where reaches of it that
Fiske pronounced impossible are declared by no mean observers to have
actually been accomplished.
It is, however, questionable how far the testimony of poets and
imaginative thinkers is the result of optimistic generalization, and how
far the result of strict experience. As sober a man as Socrates said
that his attendant monitor always kept him right. Had he had the modern
conception of the universal beneficent Law, and the very modern
conception of impressions, _under Law_, from discarnate intelligences,
perhaps he would have regarded that attendant of his as a manifestation
from the source of all Law--of that Law whose penetration into the
minutiae of our lives we are now considering.
Now if you are in the habit of testing questions by the law of
Evolution, ask yourself (if you have not already done so and obtained a
satisfactory answer), at what point in your processes and the processes
of your environment, the operation of Law, and the resulting evolution,
stops. Don't bother with the paradox of Free Will and Determinism, or
any other paradox that proves a question to be beyond the range of our
faculties, but accept the fact which you cannot escape, that your life
is the result of the interaction of two processes of Law that manifestly
tend on the whole to happiness, and perhaps you will find it as hard
_not_ to believe that the beneficent Law goes down to the minutest
details of your life, as it is _to_ believe a conception so novel and so
tremendous.
It may not be unthinkable under average circumstances, but when the
world is cursed as never before with carnage and outrage, in relation to
the millions suffering one hesitates even to suggest such an idea. But
this is hardly the time to pass upon it. And yet many sane people do
pass upon it, and believe that out of all this agony more good than evil
is to come, and to come to each person concerned. Such a belief,
however, is generally based on faith in the immortality of the soul.
Here comes in the pragmatic argument, never so strong as now. If these
millions of bright young lives have been developed merely to be
prematurely snuffed out at the behest of a barbarian mad with the lust
of conquest, the universe is _pro tanto_ a farce. But if, in the glory
of heroism and self-sacrifice, they are advanced to a higher stage of
being, the sanity and beneficence of the universe are vindicated. True,
the pragmatic argument is a dangerous thing, but in this most important
particular, it never had so much support from positive evidence as now.
It looks as if humanity were at last evolved to the point where the
intuitions of the gifted of the ages, from Socrates to Swedenborg, may
soon be supported by experience open to the observation of all.
In his day, Fiske did probably more than any other man to rationalize
these leading ideas that are still little more than faiths, and to keep
men's minds open to the best within our knowledge, and the influences
that must exist beyond it.