Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between
1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher,
aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity
in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force
himself to follow wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five
thousand millions more in money, and a million more lives.[693]
Was there purpose in it all? To this Adams and the younger men more and
more declined to make answer. Yet this much is clear, for them the end
of the theological age had come, and the end also of the great hopes of
the Enlightenment. The idea of progress was given over henceforth to
the middle class to become the plaything of material expansion.
II • The School of Spencer--John Fiske
Of the distinguished group that labored to naturalize in America
the philosophy of evolution John Fiske was the most authoritative
spokesman. As a brilliant popularizer of the Synthetic Philosophy, and
an historian who applied the Comtean law of continuity to the American
past, he brought to the Gilded Age the revolutionary influence of
English and French thought. Deeply immersed in Victorian speculation,
he threw over his acquisitions the genial mood of his generation and
infused the doctrines of evolutionary science with the spirit of
religion. He reveled in the cosmic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, but
within the material cosmos the scientists were revealing, controlling
its eternal flux, he perceived a directing will that was shaping man’s
destiny to noble ends. New England scholarship had served God for too
many generations to put aside its teleological prepossessions, and John
Fiske was too completely New England to deny his spiritual obligations.
The duty laid upon his conscience was plain. It was not enough to lay
open to the New England mind the wealth of evolutionary science; he
must justify its conclusions by binding them back upon the old faith
and discover God revealed in biology as before he had been revealed in
the Bible. And so in the heyday of Spencerian influence, before the
bleak conception of a mechanistic universe had risen upon the horizon
of men’s thought to disperse the genial glow of optimism, this learned
son of Connecticut was the prophet in America of the new order of
thought.
John Fiske was a brilliant Yankee with a voracious appetite for ideas
and a passion for cosmic syntheses. In certain respects he was the most
richly endowed of the young students of his generation of Americans.
Intellectually curious and acquisitive, he refused to be confined
by orthodox fences but ranged far in pursuit of knowledge. The pale
negations of the current New England theology, on which he had fed in
his youth, soon lost their savor, and following his natural impulses he
sought out the strongest food available. While still in his teens he
had absorbed Emerson, Theodore Parker, and other New England radicals,
and was reaching out for an ampler diet. That was in the late fifties,
when a new cosmos was taking shape in men’s minds and old faiths were
disintegrating. The several rivulets of science--geology, zoölogy,
chemistry, physics--that hitherto had followed diverse and vagrant
courses, were slowly converging and making ready to mingle their waters
in a vast common stream. Some further dredging needed to be done first,
and on that great job Darwin had long been patiently engaged. It was
a time of high hopes and young John Fiske, about to enter Harvard
College, was not one to miss the significance of so great an awakening.
Amidst his quiet Connecticut lanes he had already been making his own
discoveries. Although he had early gone through a form of conversion
to dogmatic Calvinism he had not long been content with its arid
provender, but turned to the English disciples of Positivism--George
Henry Lewes, Buckle, Mill--and was absorbing Comte with the help
of Voltaire and Goethe. In June, 1860, two months before taking
his examinations for advanced standing at Harvard, he came upon a
prospectus of Herbert Spencer’s proposed system of philosophy, and this
boy of eighteen was one of the first dozen Americans to subscribe to
the undertaking. It was a golden day in his life, that was to determine
his whole intellectual development. He became a devoted disciple of
Spencer, dedicating his labors to the great cause of evolution. To that
end he felt called to study prodigiously. As a Harvard undergraduate
he found it difficult to treat his conventional instructors with
due respect, for while his classmates were struggling with Greek
roots he was exploring the whole field of philology and rioting in
Comtean sociology. Instead of exhausting his energies with the usual
undergraduate themes, he wrote in his junior year, at the age of
nineteen, a critical examination of _Buckle’s History of Civilization_
for the _National Quarterly Review_; and while preparing for his final
examinations he wrote a learned article on “The Evolution of Language”
that was accepted by _The North American Review_.
Such intellectual precocity, suggesting to timid souls a lack of
respect for orthodox opinions, was not without its dangers. From
his first entrance to Harvard he was marked by certain tutors as a
dangerous influence. Positivism and evolution were in ill repute in
the college circles, and he was eventually summoned before the faculty
and admonished for undermining the faith of Harvard undergraduates.
Outside the college he was becoming known as the “young atheist of
Cambridge.” The reasons for such a reputation were quite sufficient
to Unitarian dogmatists who had forgotten the cardinal principle of
Unitarianism--the principle of devout free thought--for young John
Fiske had already gathered a huge pile of combustible materials that
threatened the established orthodoxy. Before entering Harvard he had
planned to write a history of early Christianity, but his interest in
science drew him into other fields--the new sociological interpretation
of history that he discovered in Grote’s _History of Greece_, and
the broad field of scientific speculation that opened to him in
Humboldt’s _Cosmos_. To this latter field he turned greedily, reading
amongst other works Cuvier’s _Règne Animal distribué d’après son
Organisation_, Herschel’s _Outlines of Astronomy_, Laplace’s _Système
du Monde_, Agassiz’s _Zoölogy_ and his _Essay on the Classification
of the Animal Kingdom_ (1857), and with the joy of a great discovery
Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ (1859). From Agassiz’s defense of special
creation he dissented vigorously, and this dissent prepared him for an
enthusiastic reception of Darwin’s careful exposition. Certainly no
other young student in America followed so closely or so intelligently
the unfolding of the English school of evolutionary thought. In solid
acquisition and in intellectual curiosity he was far in advance of
Henry Adams, then a young diplomat in London.
Upon his graduation in 1863 he determined upon the law, read through
the two-year course of the Harvard Law School in nine months, was
admitted to the bar, waited two years for clients who never came, threw
it over, and turned to his first love, the life of the scholar. He had
his eye on a chair at Harvard, but so long as the old orthodox _régime_
lasted no opening offered there. In the first year of President Eliot’s
administration (1869) an opportunity was provided and he was invited to
give a course of lectures in Holden Chapel on the Positive Philosophy.
The opposition was still too strong to permit the offer he sought--a
chair in history--but he was eventually given a place as Assistant
Librarian, where he spent five years amongst the books of Gore Hall.
Driven to other means of support he turned to lecturing, was received
with immense applause in London, and thereafter to the end of his
life he suffered much of his vast energy to drain off into that most
fruitless of jobs for a creative mind. A certain genial egoism was to
blame for his playing willingly the rôle of lackey to women’s clubs. He
liked to talk to sympathetic audiences, and he was greatly effective
on the platform. The inevitable result was that he fell short in
accomplishment of the fine promise of his early years. His style became
diffuse, his materials picturesque rather than solid, his thinking
flabby. Pretty much all his significant work was done before he was
forty.
The greater part of Fiske’s intellectual life, despite his later
incursions into certain waste places of history, was dedicated to the
indoctrination of the American people in the principle of evolution
as that principle was outlined in Spencer’s _Synthetic Philosophy_.
He was a man of one idea, but that idea was so vast and germinal,
so comprehensive in its implications and so constructive in its
suggestions, as to set afoot the greatest intellectual revolution in
western civilization. He called himself a philosopher, but he meant by
the term not a metaphysician, but a cosmic historian whose business
was to interpret the universe in the light of the great laws that
science was revealing. By 1860 science had revealed three such general
laws: the law of gravitation, the law of biological variation and the
survival of the fittest, and the law of the conservation of energy; and
from them Spencer had deduced the principle of a unitary cosmos, with
a common force sustaining both the organic and the inorganic, working
to a single “far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves.”
An intimate friend of Fiske’s, and an ardent Spencerian, puts the
intellectual situation in these terms:
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 about 1860 of the Conservation of Force. 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 one 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....
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.[694]
While still at Harvard, as a result of the publication of his two
undergraduate essays already referred to, he was sought out by Edward
L. Youmans and urged to join with him in spreading the new evolutionary
philosophy.[695] Youmans was an ardent proselytizer who had volunteered
for the job of instructing the American people in the meaning of
science. He attached himself to Spencer as spokesman and publicity