Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
agent, and was on the lookout for helpers. Encouraged thus by Youmans,
Fiske threw himself impetuously into the work of furthering the new
philosophy of evolution. As the task unfolded before his maturing mind
it came to involve three major problems: to dissociate in the popular
mind the potential theism of Spencer’s _First Principles_ from the
materialism of Comte’s Positivism, with which it was widely confused;
to elaborate the teleological implications of evolution and demonstrate
that the grand objective of all natural processes was “the production
of happiness, and that, despite occasional lapses, all records of them
prove that, on the whole, they tend not only to produce happiness, but
to increase it”;[696] and finally to apply the principles of the cosmic
philosophy to historical writing and reveal how the law of evolution
determines the forms of social institutions--to do more adequately in
the field of American history what Buckle had tried to do in a larger
field without the aid of evolution.
In all his intellectual interests and attitudes Fiske was a complete
New England Victorian, but scarcely a British Victorian. In his
erection of the doctrine of progress into a cosmic law, and in his
resultant optimism, he was at one with Spencer and the English group.
But he was a son of New England before he was an evolutionist, and
although he had broken with the grotesque, anthropomorphic dogmas of
Calvinism, he remained profoundly religious, and like Henry Drummond
he sought to transfuse science with spiritual qualities. He was
effectively a Unitarian, the leader of the Cambridge intellectuals who
were carrying on the work that Theodore Parker would have done had
he lived twenty years longer--the work of bridging the chasm between
science and religion. To that end his vast concern with teleology--that
God is the great wellspring out of which flows the unfolding cosmos,
and that the unfolding is guided and controlled to beneficent ends.
Natural law, working in a realm of causation, and shaping matter to
forms more and more complex, to John Fiske was no other than the
beneficent purpose known to theology as Divine Providence.
Pretty much all that he had to say on the question is contained in
the four volumes of _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, published when
he was only thirty-two. Written with great enthusiasm and complete
confidence, it was an attempt to summarize and restate the conception
of cosmic evolution as Spencer had defined it in _First Principles_,
and partly elaborated it in his _Biology_ and _Psychology_. It
was a timely presentation, and with its lucid exposition of the
evidence drawn from the several fields of science it furthered the
spread of the evolutionary philosophy. But it sought to do more.
Not content with arraying in due order the scientific proofs of a
vast unitary cosmos--as Spencer had done--Fiske essayed the rôle of
apologist and supplemented the facts of science with ontological and
teleological speculations. Whereas Spencer had remained agnostic,
refusing to speculate on the unknowable, and clearly implying a
deterministic cosmos, Fiske took high theistic ground, asserting
that evolution implies the existence of a creative mind, vaster than
the anthropomorphic conceptions of theology and far nobler, whose
cosmic plan unfolding in the material universe compels a belief in
a benevolent God, and a belief also in the “eternal source of a
moral law which is implicated with each action of our lives, and in
obedience to which lies our only guarantee of the happiness which is
incorruptible.” And this “eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes
for righteousness”--to use Arnold’s phrase which Fiske was fond of
quoting--is making also for altruism and the spirit of love that lies
at the heart of Christianity; for is not the prolongation of infancy
with its demands on altruism--a principle that was Fiske’s contribution
to evolution, of which he was justly proud--a master biological device
for individual variation? In consequence the evolutionist becomes not
only a theist, but a Christian in the truest meaning of the term. The
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man--to which New England
Unitarianism had come to restrict its dogmas--are in reality “two great
interrelated cosmic truths--the existence of righteousness as an active
principle in the Infinite Power or Reality back of the cosmos, and its
correlative manifestation in the altruistic consciousness of man.”[697]
Such speculation concerning the unknowable exercised an increasing
fascination for Fiske as his deeply religious nature slowly colored
the acquisitions of the scientist, and in a succession of tracts--_The
Destiny of Man_ (1884), _The Idea of God_ (1885), _Through Nature to
God_ (1899), and _Life Everlasting_ (1900)--he definitely rejected
the negative attitude of agnosticism that was a common mark of the
English evolutionary school, and turned to outline the religious faith
of an evolutionist. George Eliot’s dictum that God is unknowable and
immortality is unthinkable, was too thin a diet for his robust nature;
instead he elaborated the argument that faith in God and immortality
is reasonable in the light of the evolving cosmos that science was
revealing. To John Fiske that cosmos was not bleak and impersonal,
a vast congeries of physical forces that reduced man to the status
of a flea on the epidermis of earth, but the expression rather of a
benevolent will unfolding in accordance with a divine purpose. “The
process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology,
of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest
rudiments.” To Henry Holt this recovery of teleology was Fiske’s great
contribution to evolutionary thought.
He did more just there than any modern philosopher, perhaps than
any philosopher, to show that this teleology is beneficent, and to
restore in this way the attitude of mind which it may not yet be
too late to call Faith in God and Immortality.[698]
No doubt it was due to such emphasis on the theistic implications of
evolution that the doctrine was so quickly accepted in New England
amongst the Unitarians and liberals; but for Fiske it marked the end of
his intellectual leadership. After the battle had been won he turned
away to engage in less fruitful activities, no longer followed keenly
the new discoveries of science, and finally set himself to write the
history of America. The venture on the whole was not fortunate. In
his attempt to reinterpret the American past he suffered from grave
handicaps, an inadequate knowledge and an inadequate philosophy. He was
led into the field of history by his interest in the English school
of Grote and Maine and Stubbs and Freeman, and his ultimate purpose
was to present “the drama of American civilization, of which the
political organization of the United States was the crowning feature,
as an evolutionary development from antecedent causes and of great
significance to the future civilization of the world.”[699] But for
this undertaking he was inadequately equipped and his conscious search
for a Comtean continuity in social growth did him a real disservice.
The economics of historical change he seems never to have considered,
and his analyses of social forces are never acute or penetrating.
Although he attempted to apply sociological evolution to history he
was really little more than a political and military historian with
a special fondness for wars and the details of battle strategy. In
his first venture, _American Political Ideas_--written for his London
lectures of 1880--he simplified American political development to two
germinal ideas--the town meeting and the principle of federation, and
these two conceptions he traces back to the Teutonic folkmote and the
Teutonic principle of shire representation. The theme with which he
deals is thus stated in the preface:
The government of the United States is not the result of special
creation, but of evolution. As the town-meetings of New England
are lineally descended from the village assemblies of the early
Aryans; as our huge federal union was long ago foreshadowed in the
little leagues of Greek cities and Swiss cantons; so the great
political problem which we are (thus far successfully) solving is
the very same problem upon which all civilized peoples have been
working ever since civilization began. How to insure peaceful
concerted action throughout the Whole, without infringing upon
local and individual freedom in the Parts,--this has ever been the
chief aim of civilization, viewed on its political side; and we
rate the failure or success of nations politically according to
their failure or success in attaining this supreme end. When thus
considered in the light of the comparative method our American
history acquires added dignity and interest, and a broad and
rational basis is secured for the detailed treatment of political
questions.[700]
Only a New England historian could write so naïvely as that, for only
to a New Englander does the town meeting become a germinal source of
American democracy. Not a great historian, Fiske ceased to be in his
wandering later years a great intellectual influence. The rare promise
of his young manhood he never fulfilled, but like his generation he
suffered his energies to be dissipated and he ended in a somewhat
blowsy optimism. To Henry Holt he was a very great and learned man, but
to a later generation it is difficult to make out his vast stature.
Nevertheless as a purveyor of Victorian science to the American people
he did a useful and important work.
Footnotes
[682] The French title is, _Esquisse d’un tableau historique des
progrès de l’esprit humain_. See _Œuvres_, Vol. VI, Paris, 1847.
[683] _Œuvres_, Vol. VI, p. 11, Paris, 1847.
[684] _Ibid._, p. 176.
[685] _Ibid._, Vol. VI, pp. 194-195.
[686] _Ibid._, _Dixième Époque_, pp. 236-237.
[687] _American Thought_, p. 172, New York, 1915.
[688] Woodbridge Riley, _American Thought_, Chapter XI.
[689] _Ibid._, p. 401.
[690] For a brief exposition of Spencer’s major ideas see, William
Henry Hudson, “Herbert Spencer,” in _Philosophies Ancient and Modern_,
London, 1908.
[691] William Archibald Dunning, _A History of Political Theories from
Rousseau to Spencer_, New York, 1920, p. 400.
[692] Quoted in Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p.
201.
[693] _The Education of Henry Adams_, p. 232.
[694] Henry Holt, _Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other
Essays somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical_, Boston, 1923, pp.
327-328.
[695] See John Spencer Clark, _Life and Letters of John Fiske_, Vol. 1,
pp. 273-278.
[696] Henry Holt, _op. cit._, p. 328.
[697] John Spencer Clark, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 50.
[698] Henry Holt, _op. cit._, p. 339.
[699] John Spencer Clark, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 456.
[700] John Fiske, _American Political Ideas_, Preface, pp. 4-5.
Chapter II • The Skepticism of the House of Adams
In the welter of change that resulted from the revolutionary
transitions of the Gilded Age, one man at least stood apart, skeptical
about the worth of the current revolutions, unconvinced that all the
hurly-burly meant a rational progress. To Henry Adams skepticism
early became a habit. Doubt persistently dogged his footsteps and the
more critically he examined the ways of his generation of Americans,
the more certain it seemed to him that any were unworthy the name of
civilization. He was not at home in the new world of the Gilded Age;
and as he watched the disintegrations of the older New England in which
he had been brought up, an incurable nostalgia seized upon him and he
set about seeking another home where he might live the good life he had