chapter 15

(copyright, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, quoted with permission)._

NINETEENTH CENTURY: Difference of the Century from preceding ages.

"In the last 100 years the world has seen great wars, great national and social upheavals, great religious movements, great economic changes. Literature and art have had their triumphs and have permanently enriched the intellectual inheritance of our race. Yet, large as is the space which subjects like these legitimately fill in our thoughts, much as they will occupy the future historian, it is not among these that I seek for the most important and the most fundamental differences which separate the present from preceding ages. Rather is this to be found in the cumulative products of scientific research, to which no other period offers a precedent or a parallel. No single discovery, it may be, can be compared in its results to that of Copernicus; no single discoverer can be compared in genius to Newton; but, in their total effects, the advances made by the 19th century are not to be matched. Not only is the surprising increase of knowledge new, but the use to which it has been put is new also. The growth of industrial invention is not a fact we are permitted to forget. We do, however, sometimes forget how much of it is due to a close connection between theoretic knowledge and its utilitarian application which, in its degree, is altogether unexampled in the history of mankind. I suppose that, at this moment, if we were allowed a vision of the embryonic forces which are predestined most potently to affect the future of mankind, we should have to look for them not in the Legislature, nor in the Press, nor on the platform, nor in the schemes of practical statesmen, nor the dreams of political theorists, but in the laboratories of scientific students whose names are but little in the mouths of men, who cannot themselves forecast the results of their own labors, and whose theories could scarcely be understood by those whom they will chiefly benefit. …

"Marvellous as is the variety and ingenuity of modern industrial methods, they almost all depend in the last resort upon our supply of useful power; and our supply of useful power is principally provided for us by methods which, so far as I can see, have altered not at all in principle, and strangely little in detail, since the days of Watt. Coal, as we all know, is the chief reservoir of energy from which the world at present draws, and from which we in this country must always draw; but our main contrivance for utilizing it is the steam engine, and, by its essential nature, the steam engine is extravagantly wasteful. So that, when we are told, as if it was something to be proud of, that this is the age of steam, we may admit the fact, but can hardly share the satisfaction. … We have, in truth, been little better than brilliant spendthrifts. Every new invention seems to throw a new strain upon the vast but not illimitable, resources of nature. Lord Kelvin is disquieted about our supply of oxygen; Sir William Crookes about our supply of nitrates. The problem of our coal supply is always with us. Sooner or later the stored-up resources of the world will be exhausted. Humanity, having used or squandered its capital, will thenceforth have to depend upon such current income as can be derived from that diurnal heat of the sun and the rotation of the earth till, in the sequence of the ages, these also begin to fail. …

"After all, however, it is not necessarily the material and obvious results of scientific discoveries which are of the deepest interest. They have affected changes more subtle and perhaps less obvious which are at least as worthy of our consideration and are at least as unique in the history of the civilized world. No century has seen so great a change in our intellectual apprehension of the world in which we live. Our whole point of view has changed. The mental framework in which we arrange the separate facts in the world of men and things is quite a new framework. The spectacle of the universe presents itself now in a wholly changed perspective. We not only see more, but we see differently. The discoveries in physics and in chemistry, which have borne their share in thus re-creating for us the evolution of the past, are in process of giving us quite new ideas as to the inner nature of that material whole of which the world's traversing space is but an insignificant part. Differences of quality once thought ultimate are constantly being resolved into differences of motion or configuration. What were once regarded as things are now known to be movement. … Plausible attempts have been made to reduce the physical universe, with its infinite variety, its glory of color and of form, its significance and its sublimity, to one homogeneous medium in which there are no distinctions to be discovered but distinction of movement or of stress. And although no such hypothesis can, I suppose, be yet accepted, the gropings of physicists after this, or some other not less audacious unification, must finally, I think, be crowned with success. The change of view which I have endeavored to indicate is purely scientific, but its consequences cannot be confined to science. How will they manifest themselves in other regions of human activity, in literature, in art, in religion?"

_A. J. Balfour, The Nineteenth Century (Address before the University Extension Students at Cambridge, August 2, 1900)._

NINETEENTH CENTURY: The intellectual and social trend of the Century.

"The two influences which have made the nineteenth century what it is seem to me to be the scientific spirit and the democratic spirit. Thus, the nineteenth century, singularly enough, is the great interpretative century both of nature and of the past, and at the same time the century of incessant and uprooting change in all that relates to the current life of men. It is also the century of national systems of popular education, and at the same time of nation-great armies; the century that has done more than any other to scatter men over the face of the earth, and to concentrate them in cities; the century of a universal suffrage that is based upon a belief in the inherent value of the individual; and the century of the corporation and the labor union, which in the domain of capital and of labor threaten to obliterate the individual. …

{339}

"The mind has been active in all fields during this fruitful century; but, outside of politics, it is to science that we must look for the thoughts that have shaped all other thinking. When von Helmholtz was in this country, a few years ago, he said that modern science was born when men ceased to summon nature to the support of theories already formed, and instead began to question nature for her facts, in order that they might thus discover the laws which these facts reveal. I do not know that it would be easy to sum up the scientific method, as the phrase runs, in simpler words. It would not be correct to say that this process was unknown before the present century; for there have been individual observers and students of nature in all ages. … But it is true that only in this century has this attitude toward nature become the uniform attitude of men of science. …

"One of the chief results of the scientific method as applied to nature and the study of the past is the change that it has wrought in the philosophic conception of nature and of human society. By the middle of the century, Darwin had given what has been held to be substantial proof of the theory of the development of higher forms out of lower in all living things; and since then, the doctrine of evolution, not as a body of exact teaching, but as a working theory, has obtained a mastery over the minds of men which has dominated all their studies and all their thinking. …

"Every public educational system of our day, broadly speaking, is the child of the nineteenth century. The educational system of Germany, which in its results has been of hardly less value to mankind than to Germany itself, dates from the reconstitution of the German universities after the battle of Jena. Whatever system France may have had before the Revolution went down in the cataclysm that destroyed the ancient regime, so that the educational system of France also dates from the Napoleonic period. In the United States, while the seeds of the public school system may have been planted in the eighteenth, or perhaps even in the seventeenth century, it has only been in the nineteenth century, with the development of the country, that our public school system has grown into what we now see; while in England, the system of national education, in a democratic sense, must be dated from 1870. … Out of the growth of the democratic principle has come the belief that it is worth while to educate all the children of the state: and out of the scientific method, which has led to the general acceptance of the evolutionary theory, has been developed the advance in educational method which is so marked a feature of the last decades of the century. …

"Not only has the scientific method furnished a philosophy of nature and of human life, but, by the great increase in man's knowledge of natural law to which it has led, it has resulted in endless inventions, and these, in turn, have changed the face of the world. … The rapid progress of invention during the century has been coincident with one far-reaching change in the habits of society, the importance of which is seldom recognized. I refer to deposit banking. Of all the agencies that have effected the world in the nineteenth century, I am sometimes inclined to think that this is one of the most influential. If deposit banking may not be said to be the result of democracy, it certainly may be said that it is in those countries in which democracy is most dominant that deposit banking thrives best. … Some one has said that it would have been of no use to invent the railroad, the submarine cable, or the telephone at an earlier period of the world's history, for there would have been no money at command to make anyone of them available before this modern banking system had made its appearance. If this be so, then indeed the part that has been played by deposit banking in the developments of the century cannot be overestimated.

"During the century the conditions of the world's commerce have been radically altered. It is not simply that the steamboat and the locomotive have taken the place of the sailing-ship and the horse; that the submarine cable has supplanted the mails; nor even that these agencies have led to such improvements in banking facilities that foreign commerce is done, for the most part, for hardly more than a brokerage upon the transaction. These are merely accidents of the situation. The fundamental factors have been the opening up of virgin soil in vast areas to the cultivation of man, and the discovery of how to create artificial cold, which makes it possible to transport for long distances produce that only a few years ago was distinctly classed as perishable. The net result of these influences has been to produce a world competition at every point of the globe. …

"Democracy, as a political theory, emphasizes the equality of men and the equal rights and privileges of all men before the law. The tendency of it has been, in this country, to develop in multitudes of men great individuality and self-reliance. Side by side with this tendency, however, we see the corporation supplanting the individual capitalist, and the trade union obliterating the individual laborer, as direct agents in the work of the world. Strange as this contrast is, both tendencies must be consistent with democracy, for the corporation and the trade union flourish most where democracy is most developed. Indeed, they seem to be successful and powerful just because democracy pours into them both its vital strength. …

"The tendency to democracy in politics is unquestionably the dominant political fact of the century. … Outside of Russia, and possibly even there, monarchical government in Europe is obliged to depend for its support upon the great body of the nation, instead of upon the power of the great and the noble. … In the United States, the century, though it began with a limited suffrage, ends with universal manhood suffrage, and even with woman suffrage in some of the Western States. … Undoubtedly, universal suffrage and the large immigration of people without any experience in self-government have given form to many of our problems; but I often think there is far too great a disposition among us to magnify the difficulties which these conditions present. … {340} The fact is, in my judgment, that our problems arise not so much from universal suffrage as from the effect of the multiplication table applied to all the problems of life. … Anyone building a house in the country, when he has dug a well has solved the problem of his water supply; but to supply water for a great city calls for the outlay of millions of dollars, and for the employment of the best engineering talent in the land. Yet nothing has happened except that the problem has been magnified. Thus the difficulties created by the multiplication table are real; so that the very enlargement of opportunity that democracy has brought with it has faced democracy with problems far harder than were formerly presented to any government. …

"To sum up, therefore, I should say that the trend of the century has been to a great increase in knowledge, which has been found to be, as of old, the knowledge of good and evil; that this knowledge has become more and more the property of all men rather than of a few; that, as a result, the very increase of opportunity has led to the magnifying of the problems with which humanity is obliged to deal; and that we find ourselves, at the end of the century, face to face with problems of world-wide importance and utmost difficulty, and with no new means of coping with them other than the patient education of the masses of men."

_Seth Low, The Trend of the Century (Atlantic Monthly, August, 1898)._

NINETEENTH CENTURY: Dominant lines in the intellectual development of the Century.

"The future historian of thought will no doubt regard the promulgation and the rapid triumph of evolutionist doctrines as the most remarkable phenomenon in the intellectual development of the nineteenth century."

_Leslie Stephen, Evolution and Religious Conceptions (Review of the Nineteenth Century, in New York Evening Post, January 12, 1901)._

"In the briefest sketch of what the nineteenth century has done in literature, it is absolutely imperative to mention the publication of 'The Origin of Species' [Darwin, 1859] and 'Principles of Psychology' [Spencer, 1855], because, although neither work is written with an attractive elegance, each is the starting point of an intellectual and moral revolution so vast that every branch of life is affected by it, and literature itself—in its lightest forms—can no longer ignore the germinal forces with which evolution has quickened all our emotions."

_Edmund Gosse, A Century of English Literature (Review of the Nineteenth Century, in New York Evening Post, January 12, 1901)._

"To an earlier age knowledge was power, merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the 'summum bonum.' Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all must ultimately bow—this is the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of nineteenth century science from those of former periods."

_Professor Charles S. Peirce, The Century's Great Men in Science (Review of the Nineteenth Century, in New York Evening Post, January 12, 1901)._

"The mark of the century has been a continuous attempt at a comprehensive understanding of nature, after the manner of Newton, but not limited or governed solely by his dynamical ideas. … The Newtonian laws of dynamics as applied to matter still hold, and will always hold, but they may no longer be fundamental or ultimate, they may be derivatives from a still deeper scheme; and it is towards this deeper scheme that physicists at present are groping. The realization of a need for some such scheme constitutes the chief philosophic feature of the latter part of the century."

_Oliver J. Lodge. The Scope and Tendencies of Physics (Review of the Nineteenth Century, in New York Evening Post, January 12, 1901)._

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The failures of the Century. Its sinful mismanagement of the powers which Science has given it.

"The Nineteenth Century … has been characterised by a marvellous and altogether unprecedented progress in knowledge of the universe and of its complex forces; and also in the application of that knowledge to an infinite variety of purposes, calculated, if properly utilized, to supply all the wants of every human being, and to add greatly to the comforts, the enjoyments, and the refinements of life. The bounds of human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened to us in directions where it had been thought that we could never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. …

"But the more we realize the vast possibilities of human welfare which science has given us, the more we must recognise our total failure to make any adequate rational use of them. With ample power to supply to the fullest extent necessaries, comforts, and even luxuries for all, and at the same time allow ample leisure for intellectual pleasures and æsthetic enjoyments, we have yet so sinfully mismanaged our social economy as to give unprecedented and injurious luxury to the few, while millions are compelled to suffer a lifelong deficiency of the barest necessaries for a healthy existence. Instead of devoting the highest powers of our greatest men to remedy these evils, we see the governments of the most advanced nations arming their people to the teeth, and expending much of their wealth and all the resources of their science, in preparation for the destruction of life, of property, and of happiness.

"With ample knowledge of the sources of health, we allow, and even compel, the bulk of our population to live and work under conditions which greatly shorten life; while every year we see from 50,000 to 100,000 infants done to death by our criminal neglect. In our mad race for wealth, we have made gold more sacred than human life; we have made life so hard for the many, that suicide and insanity and crime are alike increasing. With all our labour-saving machinery and all our command over the forces of nature, the struggle for existence has become more fierce than ever before; and year by year an ever-increasing proportion of our people sink into paupers' graves.

"Even more degrading, and more terrible in its consequences, is the unblushing selfishness of the greatest civilized nations. While boasting of their military power, and loudly proclaiming their Christianity, not one of them has raised a finger to save a Christian people, the remnant of an ancient civilization, from the most barbarous persecution, torture, and wholesale massacre. A hundred thousand Armenians murdered or starved to death while the representatives of the great powers coldly looked on—and prided themselves on their unanimity in all making the same useless protests—will surely be referred to by the historian of the future, as the most detestable combination of hypocrisy and inhumanity that the world has yet produced, and as the crowning proof of the utter rottenness of the boasted civilization of the Nineteenth Century. {341} When the brightness of future ages shall have dimmed the glamour of our material progress, the judgment of history will surely be, that the ethical standard of our rulers was a deplorably low one, and that we were unworthy to possess the great and beneficent powers that science had placed in our hands.

"But although this century has given us so many examples of failure, it has also given us hope for the future. True humanity, the determination that the crying social evils of our time shall not continue; the certainty that they can be abolished; an unwavering faith in human nature, have never been so strong, so vigorous, so rapidly growing as they are to-day."

_A. R. Wallace, The Wonderful Century,