Part 34

_Phillips Brooks._--Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), after Henry Ward Beecher the greatest pulpit orator in America since the Civil War, was a native of Boston, nurtured in the best traditions of New England. A brilliant and popular undergraduate at Harvard, he strangely enough failed in his subsequent brief experience in teaching. He then studied for the ministry, at the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. As a young rector in Philadelphia, he showed his power and fearlessness in his patriotic sermons during the Rebellion. “In their relation to the politics of the land,” he contended, “the great vice of our people ... is cowardice.” He himself dared openly to lay the crime of Lincoln’s martyrdom, not alone upon the assassin, but upon the supporters of slavery in the South. From Philadelphia, he went to Trinity Church, Boston, in 1869. Two years prior to his death he was made Bishop of Massachusetts. “The Yale Lectures on Preaching,” delivered in 1877, “constitute,” says Allen, his best interpreter, “the autobiography of Phillips Brooks.... It is a book which owes nothing to predecessors in the same field.... He confines himself to preaching as he had experienced its workings, or studied its method, or observed its power.... The book captivates the reader, simply for this reason alone,--the transparency of the soul of its writer, between whom and the reader there intervenes no barrier.” This was the quality also of his sermons.

He stands in the pulpit [reported an observer] smooth-faced, full-voiced, as self-reliant a man as ever occupied such a station. He indulges in few gestures; he has no mannerisms. If, under any circumstances, he might realise the popular conception of an orator, he does not betray the possibilities here. He provokes no attention to predominant spirituality by inferior vitality. There is a splendid harmony of strength, bodily and mental, which prevents the measurement of either. It is only when he is out of his desk and level with his audience that you realise his stature. In the lecture-room or crowded street, he stands like Saul among the people. The well-balanced head and strong shoulders draw your eyes at once. He dresses well, lives well, and holds his own decidedly in social circles.... His power is not limited to his church ministrations, nor is he making himself known by some brilliant special development. It is the whole man--mentally, morally, and spiritually, leader, helper, friend--which is attaining such pre-eminence. But when he preaches, you are carried away to the need of men and of your own shortcomings, and have no present consciousness of the personality of the speaker. A transparent medium is the purest. You do not think of Phillips Brooks till Phillips Brooks gets through with his subject.

Brooks was a wide reader and a careful and original student of church history and theological discussion; he was not the profound and searching scholar that Renan vainly sought in America. He had a roomy mind, a teeming imagination, and a heart full of generosity, energy, and optimism. He lived by admiration, hope, and love. His ideas, which were large and luminous, although they did not have the final tempering that comes from passage through the slow fire of a rigorous critical method, became vital from sharing in his warmth and purity of sentiment.

In regard to his intellectual habits and methods [remarks Allen] one thing is clear, that Phillips Brooks worked through the poetic imagination rather than by the process of dialectics, although he could show great dialectic subtlety when occasion demanded. When we conjoin this power of the poetic imagination and his other gifts, the “unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment,” we can understand how he could quickly penetrate to the heart of intellectual systems, how a hint to his mind was like a volume to others, and he preferred to work out the hint in his own way.

VI. THE SCIENTISTS.

=General Remarks.=--The beginnings of science in America date from colonial days and have been touched upon by Professor Tyler. The interest of Americans in science has never abated. Readers of standard scientific literature are numerous. _The Scientific American_, founded in 1845, _The Popular Science Monthly_, founded in 1872, _Science_, dating from 1883, and several other journals of science are read by many non-professional persons. The various sciences have, in the last quarter-century at least, won a place of prominence in our college curricula. The number of disinterested scientific observers and investigators has always been large. The largest scientific organisation in the United States, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which developed from the old Association of American Geologists and Naturalists in 1847, now has a membership of over five thousand; and in addition to this and other general scientific bodies there is for workers in nearly every individual science a national organisation, meeting regularly and publishing the results of investigations. In almost every science America has produced scholars of note; in some she has furnished leaders of the world.

This is not, of course, the place, even if the writer were competent to furnish it, for a narrative of American scientific achievement. We can only touch upon a few of the greater names in mental and moral, political and legal, ethnological and linguistic, and natural and physical science.

=Mental and Moral Science.=--It cannot be said that America has taken a place of pre-eminence in the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century. English, French, and German savants still lead in this realm of thought. Yet American philosophy has made enormous strides in the last half-century and many of its exponents have won universal recognition. Porter and McCosh have expounded the views of the Scottish School; German thought has been elucidated and criticised by Harris, Bowne, and Royce; the writings of Draper, Fiske, and Schurman on the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer are well known. The psychologists Ladd, Stanley Hall, Baldwin, Titchener, and James have international reputations. In the number and equipment of her psychological laboratories America leads the world. The number of periodicals devoted to psychology, ethics, and cognate sciences is considerable. Philosophical studies enjoy great favour at our universities, both as electives and as required subjects. Some of the men briefly considered below are perhaps more famous as teachers than as writers; yet all have left their mark on the philosophical thought of their day.

_Francis Wayland._--Francis Wayland (1796-1865), a Baptist clergyman and for twenty-eight years (1827-1855) president of Brown University, wrote several well-known works on moral and political science. After graduating from Union College in 1813, he studied medicine and began practice at Troy, New York; but from 1816 on devoted himself to the ministry. His “Elements of Moral Science” (1835), his greatest work, was long a standard text-book. “The Elements of Political Economy” appeared in 1837; “Limitations of Human Reason,” in 1840; “Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System of the United States,” in 1842; and “Elements of Intellectual Philosophy,” in 1854. Wayland is most important as a teacher of morals. For him education and religion went hand in hand. Although he was not a thinker of the highest order, his treatises were lucid, exact, and attractive. He was one of the great educational and religious leaders of his day.

_Mark Hopkins._--Another great educator was Mark Hopkins (1802-1887), whose birthplace was Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and who graduated from Williams College in 1824. Like Wayland, he first practised medicine, then became a minister and teacher of moral philosophy. He was professor of moral philosophy at Williams for fifty-seven years, and president from 1836 till 1872. He wrote “The Influence of the Gospel in Liberalising the Mind” (1831), “The Connexion between Taste and Morals” (1841), “The Evidences of Christianity” (Lowell Institute lectures, 1844), “Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews” (1847), “Moral Science” (also Lowell lectures, 1862), “The Law of Love and Love as a Law” (1869), “An Outline Study of Man” (1873), “Strength and Beauty” (1874), and “The Scriptural Idea of Man” (1883). Few men in America have been more potent as intellectual and moral forces than was Mark Hopkins. President Garfield used to say that a student on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other would make a university anywhere. Great as an original thinker and expounder, he was greater as a teacher; “he built himself into the mental fabric of two generations of men.”

_Laurens P. Hickok._--Laurens P. Hickok (1798-1888), a Congregational clergyman, and professor successively in Western Reserve College, Auburn Theological Seminary, and Union College (of which he was virtually president 1860-1868), wrote a number of philosophical and theological works, among which are “Rational Psychology” (1848), “Moral Science” (1853), “Mental Science” (1854), “Rational Cosmology” (1858), “Humanity Immortal” (1872), “Creator and Creation” (1872), and “The Logic of Reason” (1875). He also contributed to theological and philosophical reviews.

_Francis Bowen._--A conservative resolutely opposed to the teachings of Fichte, Kant, and Mill on the one hand and of Darwin on the other, Francis Bowen (1811-1890) is remembered as a strong and clear writer and an enthusiastic teacher. Nine years after his graduation from Harvard (in 1833), we find him editing Virgil and publishing “Critical Essays on Speculative Philosophy.” He edited _The North American Review_ from 1843 till 1854, then became Alford professor of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil polity in Harvard College. Of his voluminous writings we can mention only a few: “Lectures on the Application of Metaphysical and Ethical Science to the Evidences of Religion” (1849), “Lectures on Political Economy” (1850), “The Principles of Political Economy” (1856), an edition of “The Metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton” (1862), “Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann” (1877), and “A Layman’s Study of the English Bible” (1885).

_Noah Porter._--Professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale College for forty-six years, and president of Yale University for fifteen years, Noah Porter (1811-1892) made a strong impression in both the philosophical, and the educational world. He was the son of the Rev. Noah Porter, for fifty years minister of the Congregational Church in Farmington, Connecticut, and graduated at Yale in 1831. He was a minister at New Milford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, for ten years; then he assumed his chair at Yale. His chief work, “The Human Intellect” (1868), ably champions the theistic view of the universe, and has had wide use as a text-book, as has also his “Elements of Intellectual Science” (1871). He wrote also “The Elements of Moral Science” (1885) and “A Critical Exposition of Kant’s Ethics” (1886); besides several books on education, of which we may mention “American Colleges and the American Public” (1870) and “Books and Reading” (1870). He also edited the revised editions (1864, 1890) of Webster’s Dictionary.

_James McCosh._--The Scottish philosophy was vigorously championed in America by President James McCosh (1811-1894). Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, of a sturdy middle-class family, he was educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh. His graduation essay on the Stoic philosophy won him the honorary degree of A.M. Becoming a minister of the Established Kirk, he seceded with Chalmers and rendered valuable service to the Free Church. His “Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral” (1850) laid the foundation of his fame as a philosophical writer, and doubtless led to his appointment in 1852 to the professorship of logic and metaphysics in Queen’s College, Belfast. From Belfast, after an active literary and educational career, he was called to the presidency of Princeton College, and thenceforward was a distinguished figure in the American intellectual world. His numerous writings after 1868 include “The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical” (1874), “The Emotions” (1880), “Philosophical Series” (1882-1885, eight volumes), “Psychology of the Cognitive Powers” (1886), “Realistic Philosophy Defended” (1887), “The Religious Aspect of Evolution” (1887), and “First and Fundamental Truths” (1894). Dr. McCosh was one of the first to point out the theological bearing of Darwinism and to announce his acceptance of it when properly understood. “Touching the thought of his time,” says Professor Sloane, “at its salient points and with tremendous vitality, he constantly insisted on the few central truths of his system in their application to each new question as it arose. Incisive, intense, and real, or rather concrete in his thinking, he felt a loyalty to truth which he sought to instil with all his might into the minds of others.”

_William Torrey Harris._--William T. Harris (born in 1835) left Yale in 1857 to become a teacher in St. Louis, where he was superintendent of schools from 1867 till 1888. From 1889 till 1906 he was United States Commissioner of Education. Although leading a busy life as a teacher, he found time for philosophical work. He founded (1867) and has since edited _The Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, the first philosophical periodical in English. His “Hegel’s Logic” (1890), while highly technical, is one of the clearest and most scholarly expositions of Hegelian thought. He has written also “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy” (1889), “Psychologic Foundations of Education” (1898), and many smaller educational and philosophical studies.

_John Fiske._--One of the greatest of modern expositors of science was John Fiske (1842-1901). He was born at Middletown, Connecticut, and entered Harvard as a sophomore in 1860, graduating in 1863. The works of Spencer and Darwin opened a new world to his vigorous imagination and he devoted many years to elucidating and applying their doctrines, in “Myths and Myth Makers” (1872), “Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy” (1874), “The Unseen World” (1876), “Darwinism, and Other Essays” (1879), “Excursions of an Evolutionist” (1883), “The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin” (1884), and “The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge” (1885). His later years were devoted to studies in American history, the events of which he interpreted as the result of evolutionary processes. His work reveals a uniform optimism.

=Some Living Writers.=--Among living writers on philosophical themes space will permit the mention of only two or three. The son of Henry James, the theologian, and the brother of Henry James, Jr., the novelist, William James (born in 1842) was educated privately and at Harvard, from which he received the degree of M.D. in 1870. Two years later he became an instructor and in 1881 a full professor, the subjects of his later interest being psychology and philosophy. He has written, among a large number of books and articles, “Principles of Psychology” (1890), “The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy” (1897), “Human Immortality” (the Ingersoll Lecture, 1898), “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University, 1902), and “Pragmatism” (1907). Especially noteworthy is his work in analytical psychology. Always clear and fresh in style, his writings have exerted a marked influence on thought both in Europe and in America.

Borden Parker Bowne (born in 1847), who, after graduating at New York University in 1871, studied at Halle, Göttingen, and Paris, in 1876 became professor of philosophy at Boston University. He has written “The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer” (1874), “Studies in Theism” (1879), “Metaphysics” (1882), “Introduction to Psychological Theory” (1886), and “Principles of Ethics” (1892).

Jacob Gould Schurman (born in 1854) has made some worthy contributions to the literature of ethics; it is a matter of regret that administrative work has of late kept him from writing more for the general public. He was born at Freetown, Prince Edward Island, and studied at Acadia College. In 1875 he won the Gilchrist Dominion Scholarship in the University of London, from which he graduated in 1877. He later studied at Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen, and in Italy. From 1886 till 1892 he was professor of philosophy in Cornell University, of which he became president in 1892. He has written lucid studies of “Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution” (1881), “The Ethical Import of Darwinism” (1888), “Belief in God” (1890), and “Agnosticism and Religion” (1896).

Josiah Royce (born in 1855), a Californian who studied at the University of California, Leipsic, Göttingen, and Johns Hopkins, has done much to interpret and popularise the thought of Hegel, and has made valuable original contributions to contemporary idealistic thought. His philosophical works include “The Religious Aspect of Philosophy” (1885), “The Spirit of Modern Philosophy” (1892), “The Conception of God” (1895), “Studies of Good and Evil” (1898), “The Conception of Immortality” (1900, an Ingersoll Lecture), and “The World and the Individual” (1900-1901). A close thinker, he writes in a remarkably fresh, vigorous, and informal style.

=Political and Legal Science.=--In the fields of political, economic, social, and legal science the most that can be claimed for American writers is that a fair number of them have achieved genuine distinction and enjoy international reputations. America is still too young to be expected to have produced independent schools of thought in these lines. What Dr. Sherwood says of the economists may have a larger application here:

The chief reason for our failure to make large contributions to economic science [he remarks in his “Tendencies in American Economic Thought”] is the same reason which explains the meagreness of our contribution to general science, viz., the all-absorbing problem of making use of the advantages within our grasp. Within a century we have been compelled to work out several most difficult problems: how to unite in a solid empire many vigorous, large, and discordant nationalities; how to stretch this empire over the adjacent territories, so as to remove dangerous enemies; how to get rid of slavery without disrupting the Union; how to make our general education keep pace with our growth in numbers and with the advance of science; how, with the rapidly shifting forms of industrial organisation, to maintain purity of government and social order; how to govern an empire without an emperor; how to push forward material civilisation without going backwards in intellectual and moral civilisation; how to stimulate invention so as to win wealth for all, with inadequate labour and capital.

These practical problems have kept us from producing men with wealth and leisure for working out solutions of the large abstract questions raised in these sciences. Nor have our writers yet succeeded in handling large masses of facts with the skill of some foreign writers. The best comprehensive work on American institutions remains Bryce’s “American Commonwealth,” the work of an Englishman. Yet in Marshall, Kent, and Story we have produced some great jurists; in Wheaton, Lawrence, and Woolsey some great writers on legal science; in Carey, Wells, Walker, and George writers of commanding importance in the sphere of political economy.

_John Marshall._--Pre-eminent among the jurists of America is John Marshall (1755-1835), for thirty-four years Chief-Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall served as an officer in the Revolution; in 1780, being without a command, he attended Chancellor Wyeth’s lectures on law at William and Mary College. Entering upon the practice of law, he quickly became known for his acumen. His accession to the Supreme Court bench (1801) marks an epoch in our legal and constitutional history. He had, as it were, to blaze a trail. The Constitution had been adopted; it had yet to be construed. A thousand questions arose as to what it meant, what it included, what it was meant not to include. Marshall’s decisions, recorded in thirty-two volumes of reports, reveal the impartial workings of a master legal mind. Such men do not often appear; it was fortunate that the American Government in its early years was guided by Marshall’s constitutional constructions. They virtually form a system of law, a system which has not since been seriously modified. “The judge who rears such a monument to his memory,” says Mr. Magruder, his biographer, “will never be forgotten; in the united domain of English and American jurisprudence there are not half a dozen such memorials; but not the least distinguished is that of Marshall.”

_James Kent._--It has been said of Kent’s “Commentaries upon American Law” (1826-1830) that they had a deeper and more lasting influence upon the American character than any other secular book of the nineteenth century. James Kent (1763-1847) graduated from Yale in 1781 and then practised law, first at Poughkeepsie, and after 1793 in New York City. In the same year he became professor of law in Columbia College. The Federalist leaders rapidly advanced him; he was made Chief-Justice of the New York Supreme Court in 1804 and Chancellor in 1814. Retiring in 1823, he resumed his teaching at Columbia, and later published many of his lectures in the “Commentaries.” His Chancery decisions, to be found in Caines’ and Johnson’s reports, were of fundamental importance and form the basis of American equity jurisprudence.

_Joseph Story._--With Chancellor Kent, Joseph Story (1779-1845) shares the glory of having laid the foundations of American equity jurisprudence. Story graduated from Harvard in 1798 and was admitted to the bar in 1801. Becoming a leader of what was later the Democratic party, in 1808 he entered Congress and in 1811 was appointed an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. From 1829 on he was also a professor of law at Harvard. For some time after Marshall’s death he was acting Chief-Justice. Many of his opinions in patent and admiralty law are still authoritative. Some of his writings are “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States” (1833), “The Conflict of Laws” (1834), “Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence” (1835-1836), and treatises on agency, partnership, bills, and notes.

_Henry Wheaton._--Less known than Story, yet in his day a prominent figure in the legal world, was Henry Wheaton (1785-1848), of Providence, Rhode Island, a graduate of Brown University in the class of 1802. He was a lawyer, an editor, and a diplomatist (from 1837 till 1846 Minister Plenipotentiary to Prussia). His “Elements of International Law” (1836, republished in several editions, and translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese) remains one of the leading authorities. Another important work was his “Histoire du progrès des gens en Europe depuis le paix de Westphalie jusqu’au Congrès de Vienne” (1841, English translation 1846). He was widely respected for sound learning and diplomatic ability.