Chapter IV (4)

But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis of an alleged identity between the character and control of human evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy and war practise.

The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal descended, or ascended, from the lower ones--as he is--and if animals are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by virtue--or evil--of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle, out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human evolution is simple. _Schluss_ with discussion!

But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the premises. They are wrong.

Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as "animal among animals," and despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing, ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation, leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have begun the course of our truly human evolution we have come an immensely long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits, and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity; and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters, which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech, writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in the race.

This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today contains all the present expression and future promise of man's higher evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man's natural traits, and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its natural validity in the great strength it adds to man's position in Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.

Now it is all this side of human evolution that the German natural philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.

The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one, would not care to live longer in it.

I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do; they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.

The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men who have sacrificed them in vain.

But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands. And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.

JOHN FISKE

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.