3. The extent of mental development in any animal is in proportion to
its infancy or the length of time involved in its reaching physical
maturity.
Waiving Numbers One and Two as of doubtful value, Number Three is
Fiske's sole original discovery, according to his confession. Further,
Huxley quotes Fiske on this theme, and adds, "The delay of adolescence
and the prolonging of the period of infancy form a subject, as expressed
by Mr. Fiske, which is worthy of our most careful consideration."
Rareripes fall early. John Fiske's name was coupled, as we have seen,
with those of Newton and Humboldt. Newton died at eighty-six, Humboldt
at ninety. These men developed slowly: the hothouse methods were not for
them. Fiske at twenty knew more than any of them did at forty. Fiske at
twenty-five was a better man mentally and physically than he was at
thirty-five. At forty he was refused life-insurance because his
measurement east and west was out of proportion to his measurement north
and south.
He used often to sit at his desk for fifteen hours a day, writing and
studying. The sedentary habit grew upon him; the vital organs got
clogged with adipose tissue. The doctor told him that "his diaphragm was
too close to his lungs"--a cheerful proposition, well worthy of a
small, mouse-colored medicus who dare not run the risk of displeasing a
big patient by telling him the truth, that is, that deep breathing and
active exercise in the open air can never be replaced through the use of
something poured out of a bottle.
People who eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, and do not
exercise enough, have to pay for their privileges, even though they are
able to work differential calculus with one hand and recite Xenophon's
"Anabasis" backward. They all have the liver and lungs too close to the
diaphragm, because that damnable invention of Sir Isaac Newton's
slumbers not nor sleeps, and all the vital organs droop and drop when we
neglect deep breathing. Inertia is a vice. The gods cultivate
levitation, which is a different thing from levity, meaning skyey
gravitation, uplift, aspiration expressed in bodily attitude. When
levitation lets go, gravity doubles its grip.
The Yogi of the East know vastly more about this theme than we do, and
have made of deep breathing an art. Carry the crown of your head high,
hold your chin in, and fill the top of your lungs by cultivating
levitation. We are gods in the biscuit!
* * * * *
After four years at Harvard and the regulation two years at the Harvard
Law School, John Fiske opened an office in Boston and gave his shingle
to the breeze. No clients came, and this was well--for the clients.
Also, for John. The law is a business proposition: its essence is the
adjustment of differences between men, the lubrication of exchange,
getting things on! Learned men very seldom make good lawyers. Law is a
very practical matter, and as for "Law Latin," it can be learned in a
week and then should be mostly forgotten. The lawyer who asks his client
about the "causa sine qua non," or harangues the jury concerning the
"ipse dixit" of "de facto" and "de jure," will probably be mulcted for
costs on general principles.
"I always rule hard against the lawyer who quotes Latin," said a
Brooklyn judge to me the other day. Happily, Law Latin is now not used
to any extent, except in Missouri.
No more clients came to John Fiske than did to Wendell Phillips, who
once had a law-office on the same street. So John sent letters to the
newspapers, wrote book-reviews, and contributed essays to the "Atlantic
Monthly." Occasionally, he would lecture for scientific clubs or
societies.
While still in the Law School he had discounted the future and married a
charming young woman, who believed in him to an extent that would have
made the average man pause.
Marriages do not always keep pace exactly with the price of corn.
Receipts in the Fiske law-office were not active. John Fiske was
twenty-six; his grandmother was dead, and family cares were coming along
apace, all according to the Law of Malthus.
He accepted an offer to give substitute lectures at Harvard on history,
for a professor who had gone abroad for his health. This he continued,
speaking for any absentee on any subject, and tutoring rich laggards for
a consideration. Good boys, low on phosphorus, used to get him to start
their daily themes, and those overtaken in the throes of trigonometry he
often rescued from disgrace.
Darwinism was in the saddle. Asa Gray was mildly defending it. Agassiz
stood aloof, clinging to his early Swiss parsonage teachings, and the
Theological Department marched in solid phalanx and scoffed and scorned.
Yale, always having more theology than Harvard, threw out challenges.
Fiske had saturated himself with the ideas of Darwin and Wallace, and
his intellect was great enough to perceive the vast and magnificent
scope of "The Origin of Species." He prepared and read a lecture on the
subject, all couched in gentle and judicial phrase, but with a finale
that gave forth no uncertain sound.
The Overseers decided to ask Fiske to amplify the subject and give a
course of lectures on the Law of Evolution.
The subject grew under his hands and the course extended itself into
thirty-five lectures, covering the whole field of natural history, with
many short excursions into the realms of biology, embryology, botany,
geology and cosmogony.
Fiske was made assistant librarian at a salary of one thousand dollars a
year. It was not much money, but it gave him a fixed position, with time
to help the erring freshman and the mentally recalcitrant sophomore
handicapped by rich parents. For seven years Fiske held this position of
assistant librarian, and hardly a student at Harvard during those years
but acknowledged the personal help he received at the hands of John
Fiske. Knowledge consists in having an assistant librarian who knows
where to find the thing.
Fiske's thirty-five lectures had evolved into that excellent book,
"Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy." The public were buying it.
Evolution was fast taking its place as a fixed fact. And John Fiske was
moving into public favor on the flood-tide. There were demands for his
lectures from various schools, colleges and lyceums, throughout the
United States.
He resigned his position so as to give all his time to writing and
speaking. And Harvard, proud of her gifted son, elected him an Overseer
of the University, which position he held until his death. John Fiske
died in Nineteen Hundred One, suddenly, aged fifty-nine.
* * * * *
"Next to the originator of a great thought is the man who quotes it,"
says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Next to the discoverer of a great scientific
truth is the man who recognizes and upholds it. The service done science
by Fiske is beyond calculation. Fiske was not a Columbus upon the sea of
science: he followed the course laid out by others, and was really never
out of sight of a buoy. He comes as near being a great scientist,
perhaps, as any man that America has ever produced.
America has had but four men of unmistakable originality. These are:
Franklin, Emerson, Whitman and Edison. Each worked in a field
particularly his own, and the genius of each was recognized in Europe
before we were willing to acknowledge it here. But the word "scientist"
can hardly be properly applied to any of these men. For want of a better
name we call John Fiske our greatest scientist. He was the most learned
man of his day. In the realm of Physical Geography no American could
approach him. The combined knowledge of everybody else was his: he had a
passion for facts, a memory like a daybook, and his systematic mind was
disciplined until it was a regular Dewey card-index.
Louis Agassiz was born in Europe, but he was ours by adoption, and he
might dispute with Fiske the title to first place in the American
Pantheon of Science, were it not for the fact that the Law of Evolution
was beyond his ken, being obscured by a marked, myopic, theological,
stigmatic squint.
Agassiz died in his sins, unconvinced unrepentant, refusing the rite of
extreme unction that Asa Gray offered him, his sensitive spirit writhing
at mention of the word "Darwin." On his tomb, Clio with moving finger
has carved one of his own sentences, nor all your tears shall blot a
line of it. And these are the words of Agassiz: "Darwinism seeks to
dethrone God, and replace Him by a blind force called the Law of
Evolution." So passed away the great soul of Louis Agassiz.
Fiske has been called the Huxley of America; but Fiske was like Agassiz
in this, he never had the felicity to achieve the ill-will of the many.
Fiske has also been called the Drummond of America, but Fiske was really
a Henry Drummond and a Louis Agassiz rolled into one, the mass well
seasoned with essence of Huxley. John Fiske made the science of Darwin
and Wallace palatable to orthodox theology, and it is to the earnest and
eloquent words of Fiske that we owe it that Evolution is taught
everywhere in the public schools and even in the sectarian colleges of
America today.
The almost universal opposition to Darwin's book arose from the idea
that its acceptance would destroy the Christian religion. This was the
plaintive plea put forth when Newton advanced his discovery of the Law
of Gravitation, and also when Copernicus proclaimed the movements of the
earth: these things were contrary to the Bible! Copernicus was a loyal
Catholic; Sir Isaac Newton was a staunch Churchman; but both kept their
religion in water-tight compartments, so that it never got mixed with
their science. Gladstone never allowed his religion to tint his
statesmanship, and we all know businessmen who follow the double-entry
scheme.
That famous French toast, "Here's to our wives and sweethearts--may they
never meet!" would suit most lawyers just as well if expressed this way.
"Here's to our religion and our business--God knows they never meet."
To Sir Isaac Newton, religion was something to be believed, not
understood. He left religion to the specialists, recognizing its value
as a sort of police protection for the State, and as his share in the
matter he paid tithes, and attended prayers as a matter of patriotic
duty and habit.
Voltaire recognized the greatness of Newton's intellect, but he could
not restrain his aqua fortis, and so he said this: "All the scientists
were jealous of Newton when he discovered the Law of Gravitation, but
they got even with him when he wrote his book on the Hebrew Prophecies!"
Newton wrote that book in his water-tight compartment.
But Newton was no hypocrite. The attitude of the Primrose Sphinx who
bowed his head in the Church of England Chapel--the Jew who rose to the
highest office Christian England had to offer--and repeated Ben Ezra's
prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. Darwin waived religion, and if
he ever heard of the Bible no one knew it from his writings.
Huxley danced on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a
valuable and more or less interesting collection of myths, fables and
folklore tales. Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and
regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade.
Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often
vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true
when rightly understood.
And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the
great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on
science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics.
To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything
that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not
yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the
figment of a disordered, undisciplined or undeveloped imagination.
Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels
in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is
undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest
of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. The engineer
sees his structure complete, ere he draws his plans. So the scientist
divines the thing first and then looks for it until he finds it. Were
this not so, he would not be able to recognize things hitherto unknown,
when he saw them; nor could he fit fact to fact, like bones in a
skeleton, and build a complete structure, if it all did not first exist
as a thought.
To reprove and punish children for flights of imagination, John Fiske
argued, was one of the things done only by a barbaric people.
Children first play at the thing, which later they are to do well. Play
is preparation. The man of imagination is the man of sympathy, and only
such are those who benefit and bless mankind and help us on our way.
John Fiske had imagination enough to follow closely and hold fellowship
with the greatest minds the world has ever known. John Fiske believed
that we live in a natural universe, and that God works through Nature,
and that, in fact, Nature is the spirit of God at work.
Doubts never disturbed John Fiske. Things that were not true technically
and literally were true to him if taken in a spiritual or poetic way.
God, to him, was a personal being, creating through the Law of Evolution
because He chose to. The six days of Creation were six eons or
geological periods.
No man has ever been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural
History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John
Fiske. His knowledge was colossal, his memory prodigious. And in all of
the realm of science and philosophy, from microscopy and the germ
theory to advanced astronomy and the birth of worlds, his glowing
imagination saw the work of a beneficent Creator who stood above and
beyond and outside of Natural Law, and with Infinite Wisdom and Power
did His own Divine Will.
Little theologians who feared Science, on account of danger to pet
texts, received from him kindly pats on the head, as he showed them how
both Science and Scripture were true.
He didn't do away with texts, he merely changed their interpretation.
And often he discovered that the text which seemed to contradict science
was really prophetic of it. John Fiske did not take anything away from
anybody, unless he gave them something better in return.
"A man's belief is a part of the man," he said. "Take it away by force
and he will bleed to death; but if the time comes when he no longer
needs it, he will either slough it or convert it into something more
useful."
Every good thing begins as something else. Evolution is at work on the
creeds as well as in matter. A monkey-man will have a monkey belief.
He evolves the thing he needs, and the belief that fits one man will not
fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into
something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery to express new
thoughts.
John Fiske, unlike John Morley, considered "Compromise" a great thing.
"Truth is a point of view: let us get together," he used to say. And so
he worked to keep the old, as a foundation for the new.
I once heard him interrupted in a lecture by a questioner who asked,
"Why would you keep the Church intact?" The question stung him into
impassioned speech which was better than anything in his manuscript. I
can not attempt to reproduce his exact language; but the intent was that
as the Church was the chief instrument in preserving for us the learning
of Greece and Rome, so has she been the mother of art, the inspirer of
music and the protector of the outcast. Colleges, hospitals, libraries,
art-galleries and asylums, all come to us through the medium of
religion.
The convent was first a place of protection for oppressed womanhood.
To discard religion would be like repudiating our parents because we did
not like their manners and clothes. The religious impulse is the art
impulse, and both are manifestations of love, and love is the basis of
our sense of sublimity.
We surely will abandon certain phases of religion. We will purify,
refine and beautify our religion, just as we have our table etiquette
and our housekeeping. The millennium will come only through the
scientific acceptance of piety. When Church and State separated it was
well, but when Science and Religion joined hands it was better. Science
stands for the head; Religion for the heart. All things are dual, and
through the marriage of these two principles, one the masculine and the
other the feminine, will come a renaissance of advancement such as this
tired old world on her zigzag journeys has never seen. Sociology is the
religious application of economics. Demonology has been replaced by
psychology, and the betterment of man's condition on earth is now fast
becoming the chief solicitude of the Church.
It will thus be seen that John Fiske's hope for the future was bright
and strong. The man was an optimist by nature, and his patience and
good-nature were always in evidence. He made friends, and he held them.
Huxley, who of all men hated piety that was flavored with hypocrisy,
loved John Fiske and once wrote this: "There was a man sent from God by
the name of John Fiske. Now John holds in his great and generous heart
the best of all the Church has to offer; hence I no longer go to
prayers, but instead, I invite John Fiske to come and dine with us every
Sunday, so are we made better--Amen."
SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS,"
BEING VOLUME TWELVE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD:
EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT
ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE
IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII