Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
[673] _Ibid._, p. 426.
[674] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 256.
[675] In his plan Professor Parrington included here H. F.
Keenan’s _The Money-Makers_, but apparently he decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[676] Chapter XXXI.
[677] Chapter XXXVI.
[678] Chapter XXXIII.
[679] Chapter VII.
[680] Chapter IX.
[681] _The Money Captain_, Chapter 22.
Part Two: New Patterns of Thought
Chapter I • Disintegration and Reintegration
The figures of the Gilded Age, colossal yet grotesque, belonged to an
America that was passing. Another world of thought and experience was
rising above the horizon--a world in which the divinities were science
and the machine--that was to disintegrate the traditional society of
the dispersion and reshape the plastic materials in new forms. The long
tide that for two centuries and a half had been running out had come
at last to the turn. For six generations the pattern of life had been
woven by the impulse of dispersion that in scattering men along a wide
frontier had disintegrated the philosophies and rejected the social
order brought from the old world, transforming America into such a
society of free men as the Enlightenment had dreamed of--decentralized,
individualistic, democratic. Dispersion, disintegration, individualism,
anarchism--such was the inevitable drift under the compulsions of a
fluid economics and frontier ways, of which the ultimate philosophical
expression had been Thoreau at Walden Pond, discovering in his bean
patch the same anarchistic principles that Godwin had learned of the
French naturists--of which the prophet had been Walt Whitman, dreaming
amidst the formless crowds of Manhattan his generous dreams of the
democratic brotherhood--and of which Jay Gould the sordid wrecker in
Wall Street was the prosaic reality.
Then had come the Industrial Revolution that in creating great cities
and in drawing men from the plow to the machine was to undo in a few
brief years the long work of the dispersion, repudiate the ideals of
the Enlightenment, and provide a new pattern for a consolidating urban
society. Thenceforward the drift was increasingly toward concentration,
with its compulsions to reintegration and conformity--the imperious
subjection of the individual to a standardizing order, the stripping
away of the slack frontier freedoms in the routine of the factory, the
substitution of the ideal of plutocracy for the ideal of Jacksonian
democracy. And this revolutionary work of the machine was hastened
by the new spirit of science that spread silently through the land,
effecting a revolution in men’s thinking as great as the machine was
effecting in men’s lives. Provincial America had been theological-
and political-minded; but with the staying of the dispersion and the
creation of an urban psychology, the ground was prepared for the
reception of new philosophies that came from the contemplation of
the laws of the material universe. The incoming of science had two
immediate results: the application of technology to industry that was
to further the Industrial Revolution; and the impact on speculative
thought of the newly discovered laws of science that was to create
a new philosophy. In the second of these twin influences lay an
intellectual revolution that was to disintegrate the old theological
cosmos, push far back the boundaries of space and time, reorient the
mind towards all ultimate problems, and bring into question all the
traditional faiths--political and social as well as theological and
philosophical. Out of science was to come a new spirit of criticism and
realism that was to set the pattern for later thought.
The story of disintegration and reintegration is a striking chapter
in American life, a story that runs through two generations--the
generation that came to maturity in the seventies, and the generation
that came to maturity in the nineties. Between 1870 and 1900 the
broad movement of thought passed through two sharply differentiating
and contradictory phases: the extension of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, and the final rejection of the Enlightenment in
consequence of a more rigid application of the law of causality in
the light of a mechanistic universe. During the seventies biological
evolution was interpreted in the light of earlier philosophies that
had come out of the eighteenth century. It was reckoned a fulfillment
and justification of the ideals of the Enlightenment, sanctioning
the doctrine of progress that had risen from the conception of human
perfectibility by a teleological conception of cosmic progress,
glorifying the ideal of democratic individualism, and putting the seal
of scientific approval on the philosophy of anarchism that had been the
flower of two and a half centuries of the dispersion. And then in the
nineties the clouds drew over the brilliant Victorian skies. With the
substitution of physics for biology came a more somber mood that was
to put away the genial romanticism of Victorian evolution, substitute
a mechanistic conception for the earlier teleological progress, and
reshape its philosophy in harmony with a deterministic pessimism that
denied purpose or plan in the changing universe of matter. It was an
unconscious return to the dark spirit long before brought hither by
Puritanism from the complexities of English society--the spirit that
dominated Calvinistic dogma before it disintegrated in the freedoms
made possible by the great dispersion.
The great changes came swiftly because the machine had made ready
the soil. Farmers and bankers do not think alike; country and town
create different psychologies. A simple, decentralized America had
been content with theology and metaphysics, and the intellectual
history of New England for two hundred and forty years is not greatly
skimped by being compressed into three words, Calvinism, Unitarianism,
Transcendentalism. What was true of New England was true of America
generally, except for the lesser influence of metaphysics. So long
as society was mainly agricultural--and in those portions where the
frontier spirit lingered on into later days--the church would retain
its dominant influence and theology would still bound men’s thought.
But with the revolutions in economics and industry, with the rise of an
urban society, the mind of America was making ready for the reception
of science and the realism that was eventually to spring from science.
Venturesome pioneers had been at work long before, digging about under
the thick crust of theology. Even in theocratic Massachusetts Increase
and Cotton Mather had professed a zeal for scientific investigation,
and the latter was vastly proud of his membership in the Royal Society.
In the eighteenth century Franklin and Rittenhouse and William Bartram
were evidences of a new spirit, and at Yale College President Ezra
Stiles made a small beginning of scientific study that was swept away
by his successor Timothy Dwight. In the early decades of the nineteenth
century an interest in science was spreading widely, as _Silliman’s
Journal_ witnesses. Asa Gray, Le Conte, and Agassiz encouraged the
general interest in geology, and in the sixties and seventies Lewis H.
Morgan turned to anthropology and R. L. Dugdale stimulated sociology by
his significant study of the Jukes family.
Our present concern, however, is not with the contributions of America
to abstract science, but rather with the changing mental attitude that
resulted from familiarity with scientific methods--the shift from
deductive reasoning to inductive investigation, with the consequent
breakdown of theology and the slow drift from metaphysical idealism
to scientific materialism; and such a changing attitude concerns us
because of its enormous influence on the fabric of our later thinking,
the total body of our intellectual and cultural life. Considered in
this light the intellectual revolution that resulted when the mind of
America, long shaped by theological dogmas, turned away from those
dogmas to consider the new universe presented by science, cannot be
made too much of. With the pushing out of the frontiers of space and
time, the discovery of a vast impersonal cosmos that annihilated the
petty egocentric world of good and evil postulated by the theologians,
the substitution of universal energy for a beneficent providence,
the conception of a ceaseless flux and flow that took no account of
teleological ends, the assumption of universal law and universal
causality, the mind of America quitted its quiet theological retreats
and set forth on a great adventure that was to carry far and the
results of which were to unsettle what before had been sure.
In this great work we have been engaged since European science first
rose on our horizon a half-century and more ago. To speak exactly,
it is not so much science that has taken possession of the mind, as
certain postulates of science, certain philosophies presumably derived
from science and justified by science, which we have felt bound to
incorporate in our thinking as a hundred years before the conclusions
of the Enlightenment had been incorporated. In that earlier philosophy
of the Enlightenment the whole drift had been towards a dissolvent
individualism, a disintegration of the earlier integration. In the new
interpretation after 1870 the emphasis came to rest on the whole rather
than the parts: in sociology, upon the historical growth of human
societies; in biology, upon the evolution of the higher from lower
forms. The individual, thus conceived of socially and politically, is
no longer an isolated, self-determining entity, but a vehicle through
which is carried the stream of life, with a past behind and a future
before. He is a portion of the total scheme of things, tied by a
thousand invisible threads to the encompassing whole. From the parts to
the totality, from freedom to determinism--such has been the drift of
thought that science has laid upon us and from which there is no easy
escape.
With the advent of such a conception the long movement towards
philosophical anarchism was brought to a stop. The integrating
principle of unity must eventually shoulder aside the disintegrating
principle of individualism; order must supersede willfulness. In the
outcome a conception so coercive was to deny all the aspirations of
our traditional social philosophy, surrendering society to a new
regimentation and reducing the individual to an impotent victim of
things as they are. Out of it was to spring the passionate protests
of later rebels like Theodore Dreiser and Thorstein Veblen. Yet for
the moment the rigid determinism of the premise was overlooked and man
was accepted as the first-born and heir of God’s benevolent universe.
In the seventies the new postulates of science were looked upon as no
other than fresh sanctions for the Comtean principle of continuity--of
evolution from lower to higher in biology, of growth and progress in
sociology. It was this middle ground that Herbert Spencer came to
occupy in the minds of his American disciples--holding to the older
individualism with its implications of anarchism, yet creating a cosmic
philosophy that foreshadowed the eventual dwarfing of the individual.
I • The Victorian Mood
The sturdy optimism that was a genial hallmark of the Victorian,
was erected on more substantial foundations than a middle-class
prosperity arising out of the Industrial Revolution; it was founded on
a systematic philosophy, built of excellent materials and laid up with
nice mortar-work, to which many hands contributed and in the finality
of which many minds believed. Its master idea was the conception of
growth, a conception that by contrast with the ideal of the static
of earlier times, was profoundly revolutionary. Perhaps the most