Part 15

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.

In explanation of this ordering of his interests, he said that he always had had a predilection for History, but that a man who needs a philosophy must get it fixed before he can properly do anything else. It is to be presumed, however, that he was also attracted to Philosophy by the fight for Evolution, by his intimacy with Youmans and Spencer, and perhaps most of all, by the appeal to a mind that, in spite of his enjoyment of the good things of life, was at bottom profoundly religious. All this involved his strong conviction of the need of building up the religious implications of Evolution, to take the place of the old sanctions which, in many minds, Evolution had set aside.

Fiske also contributed one generalization to our knowledge of biologic evolution, and that is a good deal for any man to do: many have attained fame for less. It was a generalization so important that Darwin regretted not having developed it himself. The contribution was, as most of our readers know, regarding the effect of long infancy upon psychic, and hence upon social, development. The reasons, when suggested, are as obvious as Columbus's egg: they are, of course, the aid to the evolution of the family and of altruism.

When, after Fiske had done his best on these themes, and Evolution in History became the study of his life, in that work he was a pioneer, and probably as well fitted for it as any man that ever lived. His cutting off in the midst of his plans, before he was sixty, was one of those disasters and apparent wastes which are among the great puzzles of the Universe.

* * * * *

Nowadays the man in the street would expect that in Ireland the frequency of marriage would vary inversely with the price of potatoes, and the frequency of illegitimacy would vary directly with it,--that in France, or anywhere else, the ratio of unstamped letters dropped into the boxes, to those duly stamped, would be the same year in and year out; in other words, that the conduct of men in general is regulated by environment and determined by law. But when Fiske was in college, and these ideas were new, as far as anything can be new, and when Buckle brought out a book full of them and their supporting facts, they appealed at once to Fiske's exceptional powers of correlation--of tracing order in the history he had been reading, and in the life he was beginning intelligently to observe. The precocious boy's enthusiasm was greatly stirred, and yet his critical faculty did not lose its discrimination. He wrote an essay on Buckle which was praised by the best judges in England; and when Spencer came along sweeping all these ideas into the one colossal generalization of Evolution, Fiske was wild with delight. His own studies of language had been wide enough to enable him to apply to it the new generalization, and he wrote an essay on _The Evolution of Language_ which increased the effect of his Buckle essay on both sides of the Atlantic, and received the commendation of several leading men, including Spencer himself. How much in advance of the age these ideas then were, is well illustrated by the fact that somewhere about 1860, some of the authorities at Yale actually set the students, who were not Fiske's, as a theme for discussion: "Is language of divine or human origin?" This theme was not set by Whitney: he already knew better, and was very much out of gear with Yale because of the knowledge, though as far as his colleagues were concerned, he kept his out-of-gearness to himself.

* * * * *

Fiske was never absorbingly interested in the specific problems of the elevation of the less fortunate portion of mankind, but the wider philosophic and historic problems to which he was devoted include those specific ones. The widest of all, of course, is Evolution, and probably he did more to diffuse a knowledge of that than any man of his time except its two greatest discoverers. Had he lived to apply, as he proposed, the all-comprehending law to the history of our nation from the time it became one at Washington's inauguration, his help in the perplexities which now, next to the war, most beset us, would have been invaluable. But what he did live to accomplish is of a value that probably none of us can realize, and not many even suspect.

The fundamental policy indicated by the law of Evolution is: Build on what you have. Next to the family, the one institution on which civilization rests is the right of private property--the opportunity of every man to obtain and hold it. The growth of this right made the advance from slavery and feudalism. Owing to the great difference in men's capacities, its present most marked attainment is capitalism, but with the gradual development of men's capacities, especially as promoted by the spread of education, capitalism seems destined to evolve into coöperation, of which the germs are already manifest in the savings-banks and stock companies, especially the avowedly coöperative companies whose special development has been in England. The only legitimate and permanent source of private property is production. The robbery of Russian landholders or American manufacturers to confer the semblance of property rights on the incapable, is not evolution, and can have no permanent results. In all such proceedings, the property has soon disappeared, or found its way back to the capable. Such processes are catastrophic: the only successful ones have been evolutionary. The general realization of this would probably do more to settle the irrepressible conflict between the haves and the have-nots than any other purely intellectual agency now within sight. While the word Evolution is on everybody's tongue, men whose thinking is saturated through and through by a realization of the law, do not abound. If they did, there would not be so many Bolsheviks, and Russia would still be in her place with the allies.

One of the most important causes of the war which Germany is waging against civilization, is her imperfect grasp of the philosophy of Evolution, and one reason for her imperfect grasp is the scarcity of men like Fiske. The doctrine that the fittest should and must survive is sound. Germany's doctrine that she is the fittest, is not: for it makes the tests of fitness brute force, cunning and unscrupulousness, and ignores the fact that the course of Evolution has brought into the world such forces as love of justice, sympathy, the coöperative spirit, and altruism. Whether these qualities are yet so far evolved as to be the fittest to survive, is being tested by the conflict now going on. If Germany proves herself fittest to survive, it will be proved only that although the other qualities control in many advanced places, the time for the world's control by them is not yet come. If the Allies conquer, it will be proved that that time is already here.

In a rough way it may be said that Spencer, in restricting himself to demonstrating so much of evolution as could be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion, left open too much opportunity for the German conception that evolution stops at the point where those terms stop; and it can be said, with equally rough justice, that the philosopher who, up to this time, has traced the law farthest beyond that point, was Fiske.

* * * * *

Spencer said in a letter to Fiske, February 2, 1870 (_Life_, I, 368. The italics are apparently the biographer's. We condense a little.):

"The deanthropomorphization of men's conceptions has never occupied any conspicuous or distinctive place in my own mind--_they have been all along quite secondary to the grand doctrine of Evolution from a physical point of view_. As I originally conceived it, 'First Principles' was what now forms its second part. I subsequently saw the need for Part I (The Unknowable) _simply for the purpose of guarding myself against the charges of atheism and materialism_. I consider it ['The Synthetic Philosophy'] as essentially a Cosmogony that admits of being worked out in physical terms, without necessarily entering upon any metaphysical questions, and without committing myself to any particular form of philosophy commonly so called. My _sole original purpose_ was the interpretation of all concrete phenomena in terms of Matter and Motion, and I regard all other purposes as incidental and secondary."

Spencer would not go out of reach of experiment--at least collateral experiment, but Fiske went into intuition freely. Spencer avoided the labyrinth altogether, Fiske went into it boldly, but always kept within reach of the clue of experience.

But those who do not already know the contrary, should not infer from this that Spencer ignored the field of Ethics. Quite the reverse: he made probably the most important scientific contributions to that field yet made, in tracing the evolution of the conduct of sentient beings from its first manifestations in reflex action, in the avoidance of danger, and the procuring of food, through the seeking of mates, the care of offspring, the forming of groups, up to the highest development of personal and social relations and the moralities therein involved.

But for one person who has read Spencer's _Ethics_, a hundred, probably a thousand, have read his work in the unmoral fields, and tens of thousands have their ideas of Evolution restricted to the fields explored by Darwin and Hæckel, and in those fields it is the brute and the Prussian that survive. But civilization grows in other fields.

Although Fiske was as thoroughly convinced of Evolution as Spencer was, he did not stop at its demonstration within the limits which Spencer imposed upon himself, but followed it into the fields of the spirit, as illustrated by the titles of some of his essays: _The Idea of God_, _Through Nature to God_, _Life Everlasting_, _The Origin of Evil_, _The Unseen World_.

When, in the fifties and sixties, Science abolished the anthropomorphic limitations of the Creator, it did not stop there, but abolished, for the time being, _all_ the anthropomorphic qualities, including those that have not necessarily any limitations at all. While the universe, despite frequent inadequacy, disproportion and catastrophe, still abounds in obvious beauty and happiness, Science for a time shut its eyes to beneficence, and denied benevolence and even purpose. Fiske did more than anybody else has yet done to restore them--to show that they are corollaries of Evolution. He said, in his _Cosmic Philosophy_: "The process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantest rudiments." He did more just there than any modern philosopher, perhaps than any philosopher, to show that this teleology is beneficent, and so to restore the attitude of mind which it may not yet be too late to call Faith in God and Immortality.

This attitude of mind, however, has received some impetus from new phenomena now open to Psychical Research, but hardly yet as much new impetus as the old one Fiske gave it with more limited materials.

The following passages indicate in brief what Fiske gave at length in his _Idea of God_, _Destiny of Man_, _Origin of Evil_ and kindred writings. Contrast them with the quotation from Spencer a page or two back: This is the closing passage of _The Unseen World_.

"We must think with the symbols with which experience has furnished us; and when we so think, there does seem to be little that is even intellectually satisfying in the awful picture which science shows us, of giant worlds concentrating out of nebulous vapour, developing with prodigious waste of energy into theatres of all that is grand and sacred in spiritual endeavour, clashing and exploding again into dead-vapour balls, only to renew the same toilful process without end--a senseless bubble-play of Titan forces, with life, love, and aspiration brought forth only to be extinguished. The human mind, however 'scientific' its training, must often recoil from the conclusion that this is all; and there are moments when one passionately feels that this cannot be all. On warm June mornings, in green country lanes, with sweet pine odours wafted in the breeze which sighs through the branches, and cloud-shadows flitting over far-off blue mountains, while little birds sing their love-songs and golden-haired children weave garlands of wild roses; or when in the solemn twilight we listen to wondrous harmonies of Beethoven and Chopin that stir the heart like voices from an unseen world; at such times one feels that the profoundest answer which science can give to our questioning is but a superficial answer after all. At these moments, when the world seems fullest of beauty, one feels most strongly that it is but the harbinger of something else--that the ceaseless play of phenomena is no mere sport of Titans, but an orderly scene, with its reason for existing in

One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."

And the following from a letter to his mother:

"My chief comfort in affliction would be the recognition that there is a Supreme Power manifested in the totality of phenomena, the workings of which are not like the workings of our intelligence, but far above and beyond them, and which are obviously tending to some grand and worthy result, even though my individual happiness gets crushed in the process, so that the only proper mental attitude for me, is that which says: 'not my will but thine be done.'"

And this on Immortality (_Life and Letters_, II, 317):

"The materialistic assumption that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul's survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible. With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view."

On this his biographer justly comments:

"This positive statement will be more seriously questioned now than at the time when Fiske wrote. The many able investigators engaged in probing scientifically the mysteries of psychical phenomena, are bringing forth a mass of evidence which goes to show the presence of a form of existence which transcends mere physical existence."

And as showing Fiske's attitude toward the religion around him, his biographer says:

"In Fiske's mind Christianity was the mightiest drama in human civilization: it was his rare gift that he could appreciate it with the feeling of the poet as well as with the critical judgment of the philosopher."

The passages quoted will seem almost pathetically limited, in view of the new phenomena of mind which, whether they be or be not found to demonstrate for our souls a longer existence than experience has ever demonstrated before, unquestionably already demonstrate for them a wider scope.

* * * * *

It has not been more than a couple of years since a leading American author, whose work has often ornamented the pages of the UNPOPULAR REVIEW, said: "I hate the very name of Evolution." This was because Spencer traced the law no farther than it could be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion, and our friend was a profound student of the Greek and Oriental imaginings which try to transcend all that can be expressed in those terms.

And yet a few years before, the same scholar was one of the earliest students in this country of M. Bergson--the Bergson to whom a friend lately said: "People run after you because you have covered the colossal forbidding structure raised by Darwin and Spencer, with flowers." "No," said Bergson, "I have shown that the flowers necessarily grow out of it."

The paradoxical student of Bergson, who did not see these flowers, has since grown to a better realization of them, and of the Law of Evolution. He lately said that he was tracing the course of thought from Plato to Christ, and when his companion remarked: "Oh! You're writing on the evolution of the Christian religion," he admitted the soft impeachment. But what Bergson did not do for him, has been partly done, though indirectly, as the same thing has been done for the world more than by any other man, by Fiske.

President Butler once said that Philosophy begins where Spencer left off. But he did not say, and could not justly say, that it begins beyond regions whither Spencer pointed the way. In fact he was not just in saying that Spencer's generalizations, in the regions to which he confined them, were not Philosophy, or that there was any real break between those regions and the regions beyond, where they were carried by Fiske, or even the regions still farther beyond where, whatever may be the outcome, they are now being carried by students given to legitimate Psychical Research. Spencer was too early for the movement into the latter, and as to his relations with the former, Fiske well says (_Evolution and Religion_, p. 277):

"There are some people who seem to think that it is not enough that Mr. Spencer should have made all these priceless contributions to human knowledge, but actually complain of him for not giving us a complete and exhaustive system of theology into the bargain."

Yet Spencer, though he restrained himself from transcendental speculations regarding Evolution, was by no means insensible to them when made by others. Some readers not altogether unfamiliar with Emerson will be surprised at the collection made by Fiske's biographer, of Emerson's inspirations regarding Evolution, especially as they were given on an almost negligible knowledge of the scientific development of the law. Spencer appreciated them so highly that among his few American pilgrimages was one to Concord, and this despite Spencer's distrust of intuition, and Emerson's faith in it.

By some even modern thinkers Intuition is boldly claimed to be an instrument of research; by others its very existence, outside of morbid imagination, is denied, and the only legitimate instrument of research is declared to be observation verified by experiment that can be repeated at will. The truth, as usual in controversy, includes both statements, and is covered by neither. Creatures with rudimentary eyes and ears must have "intuitions" of colors and sounds beyond their capacity of clear apprehension; and even our eyes, which must be rudimentary compared with possible eyes, have in regard to even our spectrum, intuitions, some of which have recently been made clearer by the photograph and the X-ray. These cleared-up intuitions are now added to positive knowledge. Intuition is here proved an instrument of research, and it is one in every discovery. But until verified by experiment, it is not a _reliable_ instrument of research: for what seems to be intuition is often mistaken, and is generally so vague as to be subject of conflicting opinions, and hence of conflicting action. Moreover, as the subjects of intuition are beyond our knowledge, intuitions are often held to be superior to knowledge, and worthy of greater enthusiasm. Consequently conflicting opinions regarding intuitions have probably led to more tragedies than any other blunder. There is no intuition more nearly universal than that of the immortality of the soul. But even so devout a man as Fiske pronounced it unverifiable, and it is so uncertain that all sorts of conflicting dogmas have grown up around it, until it has led not only to the self-immolations of India and the human sacrifices of Mexico, but to the Arena of Nero, the inquisition of Torquemada, the Thirty Years' War, and even within the memory of living men, the agonizing rupture of many a family.

Fiske did more, through deductions from the law of Evolution, toward putting this most important of intuitions upon the basis of established knowledge, than any man had done before him. He did this not only in his writings on _The Idea of God_, _Through Nature to God_, and _The Destiny of Man_, but in the whole tendency of his work, not only when expounding the Law of Evolution as Philosophy, but in tracing it through History. In this particular he was in advance of his great compeers in his own department: for he did not hesitate, as Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley did, to deal with the intuitions of his time. Such intuitions as are true being necessarily in advance of knowledge, there is danger of assuming to be true some that are not. This danger kept Huxley almost entirely away from them, and Spencer farther away than any other great philosopher. It was this abstention, certainly excusable and probably justifiable in one who prefers it, that makes his philosophy hated, and prevents its being even studied, not to say understood, by those who love the quagmires and mirages built up by mistaken intuition.

That essential instrument of research--invaluable, despite all its dangers--Fiske estimated more broadly and _justly_ than, perhaps, any other philosopher, certainly than his great master. This makes it singularly pathetic that his premature death should have cut him off from the investigations which have seemed to many leading minds to point to a verification--even to have reached a verification, of the greatest as well as the widest intuition of the ages. If he has risen to a bird's-eye view, or more probably a teloptic consciousness, of what is going on here, it must amuse and cheer him to see that the psychical researchers are not persecuted as the evolutionists were--as he himself was in his youth, but are at worst merely laughed at as a set of inoffensive idiots. Balfour, Crookes, Lodge, and Barrett are among them, and James, Hodgson, Myers, and Sidgwick are passed from among them; and we believe that Fiske and even Spencer, had their lot been cast in these days, would be among the most interested of them.

* * * * *

We were on the brink of writing that probably most of the readers of this essay will have heard some of those unprecedented lectures and addresses on American History delivered by Fiske during his last twenty years. But we were startled by the realization that almost another twenty years have elapsed since the last of those lectures was delivered, and that a large proportion of our readers were then too young to be interested in them. Some readers perhaps even need to be told that Fiske was the first eminent historian who had a clear conception of the Law of Evolution--so far as a clear conception was then, or is perhaps even now, possible. But his historical works containing those lectures are so well known that it would be as nearly superfluous as it is impracticable to descant upon them here. Though they were published irregularly, they make a continuous narrative from the influences leading to the discovery of America, down to the inauguration of Washington; and many high authorities give them the very first rank, and declare that the author's premature death before bringing them down to his own time is a great loss to the world.