Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of nature,[689] if before him the continuity of forces had been
inadequately understood, his intellectual kinship with Spencer
cannot fail to be remarked. The latter’s master conception, which he
arrived at independently of Darwin and which life-long he applied
systematically to the several fields of thought, was the master
creative conception of the nineteenth century--the conception of
pervasive unity and organic growth. In his well-known phrase it
was the law of continuous development from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex; and this principle he
found exemplified in the total history of nature and man. Here then
is the Comtean law of continuity, but vastly strengthened and given a
cosmic significance by deductions from the new science. Lamarck and
Darwin laid the foundations for Spencer’s philosophy, as Condorcet and
Saint-Simon had provided the backgrounds for Comte. Trained thus in
the new school of biology, Spencer erected his synthetic philosophy
upon the broadest foundations; the principle of organic evolution
sufficed to explain for him not only the history of civilization,
but the total history of life in a physical universe; and biology,
psychology, sociology, politics, ethics--all the congeries of ideals
and institutions and bodies of knowledge that shape civilization--were
but variant expressions of the development from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous.
The final effect of the synthetic philosophy was not to overset but
to confirm the major postulates of the Enlightenment. In his social
theory are unforeseen confirmations of the glowing hopes of Turgot
and Condorcet. From his studies in biology Spencer had come to think
primarily in terms of the individual, and only secondarily in terms of
the species and the genus. Now variation is the mark of the individual,
for strictly considered, nature knows no duplication of life forms,
but always and everywhere individual differentiation; yet since
likenesses are far greater and more cohesive than unlikenesses, the
instinct of gregariousness impels individuals to associate in ever
larger groups, interacting through association and coöperation, whence
arises a human society that tends continuously to pass from the simple
to the complex. On these two major premises then--individual variation
and the instinct of association--Spencer established his social and
political theory; and when the elaborate data drawn from biology and
ethnology and psychology are stripped away, the underlying conceptions
reveal a curious likeness to the master principles of French romantic
philosophy. This likeness becomes more striking as he explores the
fields of sociology and politics; and his final deductions tally so
closely with earlier theory as to warrant a disciple of Jefferson in
becoming a disciple of Spencer.
There is no break between Condorcet and the synthetic philosophy.
The great Victorian completed the work of the Enlightenment. In
establishing his individualism on the principle of biological
variation, Spencer was only restating in scientific terms the earlier
metaphysical individualism; in establishing his psychology upon an
unbroken sequence “from the simple reflex action by which an infant
sucks, up to the elaborate reasoning of the adult man,” with its
corollary of continuously expanding powers, he was rebuilding on the
foundation of Locke a fresh argument for the doctrine of indefinite
development, or perfectibility; in establishing his sociology on
the organic principle of “natural development,” which shapes the
individual to social ends, with an accruing wealth of individuation
that is the final objective of true social life, he justified the
French enthusiasm for liberty as the great desideratum, but liberty
enriched and augmented by association in a free society; and finally,
in establishing his ethics on the principle that “increasing fullness
of life is the ‘end’ of evolution,” and the “highest conduct is that
which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of
life”--that the ultimate criterion of social ethics is justice and that
“every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not
the equal freedom of any other man”--he rephrased the earlier Godwinian
principle that rational liberty under the reign of justice is the
ultimate end of society.[690]
That Spencer’s social theory should have been shot through with
older ideals is not surprising when one considers his origins and
training. Sprung from radical nonconformist stock, a congenital rebel,
extraordinarily self-sufficient and coming to intellectual maturity in
the tempestuous forties with their Benthamism, their Chartism, their
exigent democracy, he was molded by forces that in large part were a
reëmbodiment of the aspirations nullified by the Napoleonic wars and
the Tory reaction, and now come again to birth. As a consequence his
political theory, like Mill’s, was deeply affected by the revolutionary
heritage. He accepted the social contract as a “theoretical, though
not a historical, basis of political authority and institutions”;[691]
the doctrine of natural rights, which, with Jefferson, he interpreted
in terms of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
and the theory of a constantly diminishing political state, on the
hypothesis that the ultimate form of society--as in Godwin’s _Political
Justice_--will, be anarchistic.
At least, such he conceives to be the forecast suggested by the law
of social evolution. As the coercive authority of the political
state diminishes, its place will be supplied by the cohesive force
of association, until voluntary coöperation extends to all the
necessary functions of society; and since the state tends to disappear
with the growth of a rational society, the great desideratum is an
adequate sociology rather than a political theory. The net result,
therefore, of Spencer’s wide studies was a fresh justification, based
on the findings of Victorian science, of the master principles of
eighteenth-century speculation; its individualism, its liberalism, its
passion for justice, its love of liberty and distrust of every form of
coercion. The power of the majority must be curbed equally with that
of the minority and he concluded his _The Man versus the State_ with
the well-known words, “The function of Liberalism in the past was
that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true
Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers
of Parliament.” In the scientific speculations of the great Victorian
the aspirations of romantic thought came to fresh vitality; embodied in
a comprehensive evolutionary system they were given a fresh currency.
Herbert Spencer completed the work begun by Locke a hundred and fifty
years before, and his _Synthetic Philosophy_ brought to conclusion the
greatest intellectual movement of modern times.
As the young intellectuals, trained in the school of Spencer, looked
out on the universe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
they discovered, amid all its complexities an encompassing unity, a
continuous growth, a creative purpose; and from such assumptions they
justified the theory of progress, cosmic in scope and plan, that opened
wide the doors to a vaster future. If in the backgrounds of their minds
lurked the conception of determinism, it gave them no concern, for a
benevolent determinism that shapes all things to a divine end, is no
monster to be feared. In the evolutionary science were the grounds of
a genial optimism that nothing could shake. If they had lost something
of the jauntiness of the transcendental faith that beheld God plowing
furrows at Brook Farm, they were armed with a scientific faith that
by tapping stones and comparing fishes they should find His plan in
an evolving series of life forms. Browning’s Fra Lippo was a good
Spencerian in his vigorous pronouncement:
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
That progress was the law of the universe was held to be axiomatic
by the new evolutionary school, and the American read in the new
philosophy an added confirmation of a prepossession common to all
Americans since Franklin and Jefferson, and become the common faith
after the War of 1812. In sober minds it led to a complete reshaping
of the outlook upon life, and in unbalanced minds it ran riot in all
sorts of blowsy enthusiasms. Freedom, love, benevolence, progress
towards a millennial perfection--these were the clarion notes in a huge
symphony in praise of human perfectibility that assaulted American
ears in the Gilded Age. Not Henry Ward Beecher alone was the prophet
of the new day. In the early seventies Mrs. Victoria Woodhull, one of
the minor prophetesses, established a paper dedicated to the high end
of “the Universal Religion of the Future ... the Universal Home ...
the Universal Science, called Universology, based on the discovery and
demonstration of Universal Laws ... and an accompanying Philosophy of
Integralism”--the “organ of the most advanced thought and Purpose in
the World ... the Organ of Cardinary News ... News of the Aspiration
and Progression of Mankind toward Millennial Perfection.”[692] By
contrast with such rhythmic enthusiasms the familiar lines of Tennyson
are sober prose.
Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.
How logically to young intellectuals of the seventies it all followed
from the premises! If man is a rational being, potentially excellent
and capable of indefinite development, the idea of a humane and
rational progress in civilization is an inevitable deduction; and the
evolutionist above all men was certain to build into his philosophy
the cardinal idea of a unified progress, but given a cosmic sweep,
accepted as the master principle in all fields of the material and the
spiritual. It was the law of life, as the static was the law of death.
No thinker who had grasped the idea of organic growth, could escape
its larger implications; and no student in the seventies could think
seriously without coming upon it.
3 • The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment
Then a film of haze slowly gathered upon the face of the brilliant
sun and the light of men’s hopes grew dimmer. As physics encroached
upon the interest in biology, and leadership in speculation based
on scientific findings passed from Spencer to Ernst Haeckel, young
Americans of the next generation found the membership of the current
philosophical trinity changed for them, and instead of unity, growth,
purpose, they discovered unity, flux, chance. Purpose had disappeared
from the grim face of the material universe, and they found themselves
in the coils of a determinism that was more likely to prove malignant
than benevolent. The idea of progress slipped quietly from their
minds, and in its stead was only a meaningless and purposeless flux
of things. But unity remained to bind the individual upon the whole
and dwarf him to a pin-point in a vast macrocosm. The intellectual
history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century--in America as
well as elsewhere--in its teleological aspects is the history of the
shift from the benevolent evolutionism of Spencer to the mechanistic
materialism of Haeckel, with all the dislocations and readjustments
involved in the cataclysmic change; and _The Education of Henry Adams_,
that curiously suggestive study in disillusion, is saturated with the
pessimism that followed upon the transition--a pessimism exuding from
the contemplation of the bleak unity of a mechanistic universe. Of the
earlier period before hope was gone, he wrote thus: