The Unpopular Review, Number 19

One of the strange symptoms of the modern tarantism is this unrelenting
hostility to beauty: in fashion not less than in art it is the ugly and
the queer, in fiction and verse the pathological, the unpleasant, that
seem to be assiduously striven for. The arts are sisters, children of
one father; their aims are closely allied, and if one step down from her
high estate, the others are likely soon to show the unfortunate
influence of her example. Bad taste in sculpture affects us more
disagreeably than bad taste in painting, because sculpture stands forth
with us, in our own atmosphere, while the picture confines within its
frame an atmosphere of its own; bad taste in dancing is worse in the
drawing room than on the stage, being by so much nearer; and bad taste
in literary expression is more distressing than any, because, after all,
it is only music which has so intimate an appeal as the written word.
Only music and the written word become a part of us, dwelling with us
unsought, singing to us unurged, lingering with us in the silent hours
when our mental sentinels or taskmasters are off guard, and if a
graceless pretender, professing to be what he is not, intrude upon the
starry company of the heaven-born, shall not the intrusion be resented?

What is poetry? There are many definitions with which few of us can
quarrel; but one of the most direct, and at the same time most
comprehensive, is that poetry is the expression, in terms of beauty, of
what humanity feels–that beauty of thought, beauty of feeling, beauty
of form, which implies truth, sympathy, clarity of vision, imagination,
and the unerring sense of fitness which is good taste. And if this
God-given beauty, twin-sister to music, be not inextricably woven, like
a three-fold thread of gold, through and through the very fabric of the
soul, it is never to be acquired–no mastery of prosody, of rules, of
libraries full of the "best examples," will avail. It is distinct from
inspiration, which may be a single bolt from the blue: it is rather an
attribute, to venture upon the methods of Sir Boyle Roche, of the voice
of that inmost higher self which the late F. W. H. Myers called "the
subliminal mind" and which Maeterlinck has termed "our unknown guest."
Let the man whose literary endeavor, well-intended though it be, is
without this essence, call himself what he please: he is not, nor can he
ever be, a poet.

Meanwhile, those who remain unbitten of the dread _Lycosa_ may find
peace in M. Andre Salmon's dictum that "critics encourage the most
absurd, for the most absurd is necessary to art"–which may be stretched
to include the art of letters–and anything that is really necessary
may, by right effort, be endured. It is sufficiently clear that not on
this side of the bridge of Al Sirat shall we and the Neo-Parnassians
agree: but we can at least avoid each other like gentlemen.

HUMANISM AND DEMOCRACY

When our fathers formulated their program for democracy, and announced
that its chief objective was to secure for the individual, life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, contemporary records show that
they generally believed that if these ends could be attained, a new
golden age would be inaugurated among men, and that all the various ills
would drop out of life. We have been disillusioned. Since the
formulation of the Declaration of Independence we have learned the
extreme antiquity of man upon the earth, and we have learned by what
slow and tortuous paths the human family has zigzagged up to its present
state of imperfection. To-day we do not hope that any form of government
can assure us an immediate millennium, and we look with suspicion upon
any prophet who promises an immediate utopia. Condemned as we are to
look with straining eyes towards a distant land of promise, some remote
perfection of our race, we are all the more jealous of our chance to do
our bit in achieving that goal. The inalienable right to life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness, has yielded place to the inalienable right to
grow. Forms of government seem worthy to endure, in proportion as they
minister to growth. We still cling to democracy, because it still seems
to promise the largest chance for growth. It is a significant fact that
along with the phrase "make the world safe for democracy," there has
sprung into existence the phrase "make democracy safe for the world," as
if to warn us that democracy like all forms of government, is not an end
in itself, but a means to an end, and that end is humanism.

In conceiving this paper, my patriotic purpose was to prove how humanism
helps democracy, but all the way along I have been conscious of being
guilty of an enormous _hysteron proteron_, for the real issue is not how
humanism helps democracy, but how much democracy helps humanism. And
what is humanism? Something too large to be defined in a single sentence
or paragraph. It is a number of things. In the first place humanism is
humaneness; not exactly, however, the kind of humaneness that the editor
of the _New Republic_ believes in. Perhaps you remember how a year ago a
distinguished professor of Greek hung a metaphorical millstone about the
neck of Mr. Abraham Flexner and cast him into the midst of the sea,
because he had attempted to poison the well-springs of knowledge for a
whole generation of young people. On the millstone was inscribed the
indictment: "Mr. Flexner is not the first man who has had the courage of
his insensibilities." At this the editor of the _New Republic_ declared
that the distinguished professor had been very inhumane, and was
therefore an unfit exponent of the humanities. One wonders with what
gentle and humane words Minos and Aeacus and Rhadamanthus will speak to
Mr. Flexner when he comes to judgment in that long line of those who,
having done irreparable harm in this world, present as their only excuse
the fact that they were sincere in their good intentions. Humanism is
humaneness based where Socrates and Plato based it, on knowledge,
understanding and intelligence.

Humanism is a conservation of the highest achievements of the human
spirit. It gives substance to the seemingly paradoxical belief that for
the rank and file of men, nine-tenths of the future lies in the
past,–that certain giant men long dead, still have power to lead the
race to heights that the majority of us but dimly see. To put it
negatively, humanism represents the belief that a majority of each
generation go to their graves without having entered upon their
inheritance, without even having suspected that they had an inheritance,
having lived not so much in their sins, as in ignorance of the glory
that humanity has already attained.

A true humanism will include and properly appraise the mental
achievements of its own age. The danger always is that the newer
achievements will be seen out of all proportion, and overrated because
of their nearness. To-day we are dazzled and blinded by the stupendous
achievements of a new materialism, a materialism far subtler than that
which sprung up a century ago. In the first half of the Nineteenth
Century some men of repute were saying that "the brain secretes thought
as the liver secretes bile," and "life is but the action of the sun's
rays upon carbon." Against this gross and crass materialism Emerson
arose as our champion, a prophet who had lighted his torch at the altar
of Prometheus in the Academy of Plato. By the light of that torch men
again began to see things in true proportion, and to-day we can say of
those earlier materialists "their knowledge is the wisdom of yesterday."
But the new materialism is far subtler, boasting far greater
achievements. Two years ago the headlines in the papers announced that a
man in Washington had talked by wireless telephony with a man in Hawaii.
We were filled with pride at this new demonstration of the power of the
human mind to master the laws of the external universe. And yet after
all, the question is not how far you talk, but what you say. Did the man
in Washington say to the man in Hawaii anything so important as the
messages which Plato sent by wireless across the centuries to Emerson?
When we read the prayer which Plato put into the mouth of Socrates at
the close of the Phaedrus: "Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may
the outward and inward man be as one. May I reckon the wise to be the
wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a wise and temperate
man can bear and carry," we are ready to strive to prepare ourselves to
be torch-bearers in the great race.

This is no small program that humanism undertakes:–to make a man
thoroughly humane; to eradicate all the brutal instincts and all the
cruel traits which two hundred thousand, perhaps two million years of
savagery have implanted in his nature; to conserve for him and in him
all the highest spiritual experiences of the race; to make him a worthy
member of any celestial gathering however nobly conceived and
constituted, this is a program requiring not merely the fifteen or
twenty years usually allotted to formal education, but a lifetime, and
perhaps a million years beyond. The million years beyond is too much for
the practical man, and he holds up his hands in protest, declaring:
"Such doctrine is too other-worldly for me. If you train the children to
tune their harps for another world, who is going to kill the hogs, and
dig the sewers, and mine the coal?" To such a question I would reply in
the same tone: "You need not worry. There is a certain gentleman, a
veritable colossus on the educational sky-line, who uses one foot to
direct the schools at Gary, and the other foot to trample down an
over-rampant idealism in New York City. He will see to it that the
millennium is not ushered in too hastily." In the last municipal
election in the city of New York, we had a splendid example of Tammany's
political astuteness in temporarily aligning itself with the idealism of
the proletariat on the east side. To the foreigner who comes to this
country, America means one thing above all else, and that is the chance
to emerge from the class in which he was born. The rebellion among the
foreign population of New York against the Gary system, was not a
rebellion against industrial education as such, but a rebellion against
the idea that their children were to have industrial education and
nothing more. Our practical man, even if he is unwilling to look forward
a million years, must at any rate look back a million years. No one can
hope to see our educational problem in its true perspective unless he is
willing to take his stand at the entrance of a palaeolithic cave, and
look across the centuries at the toils of our race as it has attempted
to differentiate the brutal from the human.

In every school house there are palaeolithic children, neolithic
children, bronze age children, iron age children, children of the golden
age, children of a thousand different aptitudes and limitations. The
mussed up condition of our educational program, the incoherent wrangling
about educational theory, is largely due to our failure to keep this
steadily in mind. Somehow we have not fully appreciated the fact that
endowment is more than training, and we are still hoping that in some
way we can perform the miracle and carry the neolithic child on our
shoulders across the ten thousand, or possibly the fifty thousand, years
that intervene between him and abstract thought. And because we have
wished to do the greater miracle, we have failed to do the lesser one
that makes for the slow but sure growth of the race. It is not strange
that a cry has gone up for vocational training. It is strange, however,
that we did not foresee this just demand, and meet it even before the
demand was made. At the present moment there is danger that the
interests of the more gifted child will be sacrificed to meet the need
of the less gifted one, that our whole public school system will be
Garyized, and that the proper foundation of our higher education will be
impaired if not destroyed. In a neighboring state a year or two ago, the
state superintendent of education sent out notes to the smaller high
schools advising that courses in domestic science and agriculture be
substituted for geometry and Virgil. It did not occur to him that he
could establish a lower form of education without destroying a higher
form. It did not occur to him that the state was rich enough to pay for
both forms. Many years ago I lived near a rich stock-man who owned the
finest herd of shorthorn cattle in the Middle West. He paid a man $2,000
a year to care for his cattle; he sent his children to a school where no
teacher received more than five hundred dollars a year. I will not say
that he cared four times as much for his cattle as for his children, but
I will say that we have here the solution of our problem. If we would
spend four times as much money on our elementary schools, vocational and
industrial courses could be properly established, classes could be
reduced from fifty to fifteen, the needs of each pupil could be
carefully studied, the pupil of lesser gifts could be directed into
industrial courses without humiliation, and the pupil of higher gifts
would make his way normally and naturally to geometry and Virgil.

In one year of the war we are spending twenty billion dollars. The
interest on this vast sum at four per cent. is eight hundred million
dollars a year,–or just fifty millions more than we spent on all forms
of education last year in the United States. We are willing to spend
this amount of money to make the world safe for democracy. Are we
willing to spend a similar sum to put real meaning and content into the
word democracy? It is conceivable that during the war we may become so
accustomed to giving and tax-paying that after the war we may be willing
to make similar sacrifices that democracy may have a fair chance to bear
its true and legitimate fruits. In the first year of the war Mr.
Rockefeller has given to the Red Cross and other philanthropic causes
$70,000,000. He has done this with immense satisfaction, and without
serious inconvenience. It is to be hoped that during the war he and our
twenty-two thousand other millionaires may become so accustomed to
paying income taxes that it may degenerate into a habit, and that after
the war, from this source our funds for education may be doubled or
trebled. Mr. Rockefeller should be financing not merely Mr. Flexner's
experiment station in secondary education; he should be financing a
hundred other secondary schools in an equally splendid way. But we can
never hope to make our educational program really significant, merely by
compelling the millionaires to pay their rightful share of the expense.
We shall never succeed in this program, until we have become
sufficiently interested in the matter to be willing to make sacrifices
ourselves. It is with extreme regret that I am compelled to admit that
the heart of this great problem is economic, and that the streets of the
New Jerusalem we are striving to build, must be not metaphorically, but
literally paved with gold.

If we can assume that after the war industrial education will be
properly established and financed without diverting funds from the
higher forms of education, if we can even assume that the funds
available for the more humanistic training will be greatly increased,
there still remain two potent forces in our educational world which
seriously threaten to undermine and impair our democracy and the
humanism which is its eventual goal. I refer to the corrupting influence
of athletics in our high schools and colleges, and the attitude of the
state towards the small college.

One can hardly "see life steadily and see it whole" without recognizing
the fact that it is necessary to house a sound mind in a sound body; but
after all, the supreme thing is the sound mind. If our school and
college athletics had been willing to make this its chief objective,
little or nothing could be said in arraignment of athletic contests. But
the present athletic situation makes one ready to cry aloud that ancient
indictment found in a fragment of the Autolycus of Euripides: "Of all
the countless ills that prey on Hellas, there is none that can be
compared with this tribe of athletes."

Since athletics have been introduced into the public high schools of the
Middle West, there is no question that a somewhat larger number of boys
have continued in the high schools. There is also no question that there
has been a very marked lowering of intellectual standards. And what is
worse, our high school students and whole communities have been imbued
with a false sense of proportion. To run half as fast as a greyhound, to
jump one-fifth as far as a kangaroo, to kick one-tenth as hard as a
Missouri mule, these are the principal things, these are the weightier
matters of the law. These contests with the brute world, in which we are
always defeated, have taken the place of the higher intellectual
contests of humanism. The school superintendent or principal who can
turn out a winning team, he is the man, the new patriot in our
democracy. Let me illustrate. Three years ago in one of the small towns
of Iowa, the superintendent of schools received a considerable increase
in salary because he had turned out a basket ball team that had defeated
all the teams in the neighboring high schools. The next fall four
members of the winning team entered the State University of Iowa as
freshmen. Before the end of the year they had all been sent home because
they could not do their intellectual tasks.

But to turn to a second menace to humanism–the attitude of the state
towards the small college, or perhaps it would be truer to say the
attitude of the administrative officials of our state institutions
towards the small college. A conversation which I had last summer with
the dean of the college of liberal arts in one of our state
universities, will illustrate what I mean. In this conversation the dean
expressed the opinion that the great majority of small colleges in the
Middle West would be reduced to junior colleges (i. e. their work would
be limited to the freshman and sophomore years), or meet with entire
extinction. He was even more specific in his prophecy, saying that five
per cent. of the colleges of the type of College X would die or become
junior colleges during the war (if the war lasted three years) because
of the reduced income from tuition, and reduced financial assistance
from private gifts. He made this prophecy with a smile, as one heralding
a blessing. For the moment he forgot that a majority of the students in
his graduate school came from colleges of the same class as College X,
and he failed to foresee that if his prophecy were fulfilled, large
sections of the state would be left in educational darkness. Now College
X has had an honorable history of forty-five years. It has done much to
make democracy safe for the world. It has sent out hundreds of graduates
and ex-students fit to participate in self-government, and with some
notion of what is meant by an international mind. At the present moment
it counts among its alumni one hundred and forty-two who are engaged in
teaching, including one university president who administers $18,000,000
for educational purposes, and twenty-five college professors in such
institutions as Beloit, Drury, Dupauw, Lawrence, Grinnell. Many others
of its alumni, on their way to law, medicine, theology, have served the
state effectively as teachers. And yet the dean would brush aside this
work with a smile, would allow this college and similar colleges to die
or be reduced to junior colleges, without a word of protest, perhaps in
the thought that his own college of liberal arts would minister
adequately to the educational needs of the state. In that state at the
present moment privately endowed institutions are caring for more than
twenty thousand students, and are making an annual gift to the state of
more than three million dollars. These institutions are well scattered,
and reach localities untouched by the university. Higher education must
be carried to the various communities. The number of young people that
can be sent to college is increased fivefold, if those young people can
be housed and boarded at home, and if there is no railroad fare to pay.
To illustrate: the county in which the state university in question is
located, sends seven hundred and eighty-nine students to the university,
more than the total number sent by sixty-three counties in remote
corners of the state. Out of five hundred degrees conferred by the
university in one year, one-fifth go to students residing in the county
in which the university is situated. It is obvious that the university
is bringing higher education to one county, and failing to bring it to
sixty-three counties. The work however is being done by the small
colleges. But the dean was right when he intimated that many of these
small colleges are fighting for their lives. Twenty-five years ago the
professors in College X were receiving $1,500 a year,–a home
missionary's salary even in those days; but to-day they are still
getting $1,500. Last year a deficit made a considerable inroad on the
endowment fund. This year the deficit will be larger, because seventy of
her advanced students have gone into the army. And the state stands by
in indifference, watching an institution die that has served it well for
forty-five years–an institution that it must replace at public expense,
or leave a corner of the state in educational darkness. I think that the
real hope of the dean was that such colleges might be reduced to junior
colleges, and that the available funds might be spent in improving the
instruction in the freshmen and sophomore years. But he could hardly say
this, for last year the students in his own university were loudly
protesting that they were being neglected, and that teaching had been
sacrificed on the altar of research. But even if the dean could not say
it, why is it not a reasonable suggestion? Why not cut off the last two
years of the college course and improve the instruction in the earlier
years? For the simple reason that the state is too rich to permit of any
curtailment of the opportunity of intellectual growth for its young
people. It is gratuitous assumption that the students who had done two
years' work in the small college would complete their work in the
university. The small minority who are going into professional work
would do this, but the large majority would end their training with the
sophomore year, and democracy and humanism would suffer simultaneously
an irremediable blow. Let us hope that the historians of later times
will not be compelled to write: "In 1917 the Kaiser not only blew up the
cathedrals in France, but he also helped to dynamite our American
colleges."

There is an old proverb to the effect that the streets of Jerusalem were
kept clean by every man sweeping that part which lay before his own
door. On one side of our domain runs the Lincoln Highway, on the other
side the road which began before the altar of Prometheus in the groves
of Academe. Both of these roads later converge in that straight and
narrow path that leads unto life. It is our high function to keep these
roads free and unobstructed–to walk a few parasangs with gifted young
people; to fit them to be effective ambassadors of Truth, by persuading
them to thumb a Latin lexicon until they have attained a reasonable
precision of speech; to help them attain the refinement of diction that
shall eventually result in a greater refinement of character; to teach
them to appreciate the beauty of a Greek temple or of a fragment of
Greek sculpture, furnishing them with a basis of aesthetic judgment, that
will serve them well until they meet Plato's archetypes face to face; to
feed their imagination with the radiant buoyant life of Homer; to show
them how Horace fashioned a livable life philosophy out of the _aurea
mediocritas_ of Aristotle; to initiate them into the Socratic doctrine
that Knowledge is the mother of all the virtues; to crown them with a
universal sympathy by interpreting with them the "_Lachryma rerum_" of
Virgil. Can anyone conceive a life in which pleasure and duty are more
inextricably intermingled?

This is the humanism that is the fairest fruit of democracy, and which
in turn makes democracy possible. Two years ago I heard one of our most
eminent political economists say in a public address that the chance of
success for a democratic form of government was in direct proportion to
the number of citizens who were capable of abstract thought. We do our
abstract thinking in the main through the help of Greek and Latin
derivatives. Let us not underestimate, and let us not permit anyone else
to underestimate, the importance of our contribution to the success of
democracy, when we train our students to a certain precision in the use
of Greek and Latin derivatives, by long years of patient drill in
careful translation. It is our privilege to help develop their latent
powers of abstract thought by furnishing them with the tools with which
they may do their thinking. This is the largest single contribution we
can make to human life, the largest single offering we can lay on the
altar of Truth.

Our success in holding ourselves and our students to this great task
will be determined largely by the set of life values we carry into the
class room, and by our ability to differentiate that which is important
in Greek and Roman civilization from that which is negligible and
unessential. I sometimes fear that we have forgotten that only the
higher elements of any civilization are worthy to be transmitted to
posterity, and that forgetting this we have permitted many of our
courses to be denaturized, dehumanized, and Germanized.

In seven out of ten of the text-books of the classics edited for college
use, the notes are written, not for freshmen and sophomores, but for
those who have already attained or are going to attain the degree of
doctor of philosophy, a degree that was first made in Germany. This
blight of the doctor's degree has invaded not only our courses in the
classics, but every course in the university curriculum that can in any
sense be called a humanistic course. It is high time that we form a
solemn procession and make an offering on the altar of Robigo, god or
goddess of the rust.

In the natural and physical sciences we do not resent or criticize
futile experimentation. We are willing that that six hundred and five
futile experiments may be made that the six hundred and sixth may be
successful. We expect this work of experimentation to be more or less
dehumanizing, in its drudgery, that in the end the fruit of the
successful experiment may confer some blessing upon the human family. We
do not protest against a doctor's dissertation in science in which the
results are wholly negative. But we do protest against a doctor's
dissertation in literature or history, which has compelled the _doctor
designatus_ to spend months of his time on some inconsequential subject,
giving him a false perspective and a false sense of proportion that it
will take him years to get rid of in his teaching.

Let it be understood that this protest against the doctor's degree is
not a protest against the length of time that is given to graduate
studies in preparation for teaching. This should be increased rather
than diminished. It is a protest against some of the objects to which
years of graduate study have been devoted under the shadow of the
doctor's degree. It is "a place in the sun" that we are demanding. In
using this phrase "a place in the sun," I am not plagiarizing that one
whom Henry Van Dyke has christened "the damned vulture of Potsdam," but
a far better man, Diogenes of Sinope, who once requested Alexander the
Great to get out of his daylight and give him his place in the sun.

In conclusion let me cite an incident from the life of Zeno, the founder
of Stoicism. It is related that Zeno once asked the oracle what he ought
to do to live in the most excellent way. The reply came back that he
ought to become of the same complexion as the dead. Whereupon he
immediately inferred that he ought to apply himself to reading the books
of the ancients. This is the Zeno who promulgated the doctrines of the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, who fashioned the molds in
which the Roman Law and Roman Christianity were cast, who conceived of a
world democracy in which friendship should be the guiding principle, and
in which Greek and barbarian alike should have equal privileges and
equal opportunities for growth.

THE MODERN MEDICINE MAN

Medicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having
passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and
homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called "preventive medicine"
which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly
understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited
to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and
this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of
the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together.
Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion
is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest
and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the
modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils
that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and
incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the
flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to "go and sin no more."

It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in
what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls "the
psychic or symbolic system" that the modern medicine man takes as his
province. In this No Man's Land he is master of all he surveys, and his
sextant comprises the universe in its angle.

We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern
life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these
symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the
earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed "paranoiac
delusions of persecution," a kind of _manie a deux_, accompanied by
hallucinations of vision described as "seeing snakes." Their elder son
was afflicted with a "homicidal mania," while the younger was apparently
a case of "constitutional inferiority." Noah was a well recognized
"alcoholic," Job was subject to severe "depressions," Nebuchadnezzar
exhibited "praecox dilapidations of conduct" and Saul was a pronounced
"manic-depressive." The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out
case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such
difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said,
on the highest authority, "Come now, and let us reason together, saith
the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as
snow."

It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature
that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous,
Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis
for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis,
at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and
particularly for those orgies and "hang-overs" of the soul, the
"manic-depressive psychosis."

This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases,
the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the
form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate
psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged
spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a
near relation to the "hysteric" refuge of the aesthetic nature from the
vulgarities of everyday life, the "praecox" preference for childhood's
happy hour, and the "paranoiac" escape from the banalities of a society
composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably
tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher
nature, the reaction of the superman, that creature of light and air, to
the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis
drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the
butterfly.

In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue
to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world
made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the
overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to
the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to
something in the nature of a "cure" for the disease of superevolution,
some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the
impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the
gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.

Psychoanalysis appears to be the "indicated" treatment for these
adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to
suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the
mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.

To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should
perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat
unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology,
it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy
of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly
fancied to exist only in young ladies' boarding schools. Figure to
yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your
"soul," and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly
sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to
those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of
other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn,
whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable
narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one
anothers' sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze,
the secret springs of their existence.

The psychoanalytic process begins, I may explain, with such a relating
of one's personal history, occupying many hours, and covering all that
one has ever done, said or thought. One starts with reminiscences of the
nursery and the kindergarten, and passes on to a detailed description of
the coloring, height and contour of one's first love. As this, in the
case of a woman, is supposed to be her father, it is necessary to pause
for some time on the aspects of the paternal figure, which affect all
her subsequent emotional reactions, according to the well-known course
of the so-called "Oedipus complex." This is the imposing designation for
the generally observed preference for each other of mothers and sons and
of fathers and daughters, a phenomenon that the new psychologists, who
take the common place with a seriousness! deem worthy of the most
painstaking examination and erudite elucidation. "The root complex" and
"the family romance" are other alluring titles for this parental-filial
relation. This sentiment is supposed to modify all the so-called
"affective" life. If father happens to be tall and thin and blond, then
daughter, having a "fixation" on him, is, for all time to come,
particularly susceptible to the attractions of tall, thin, blond men of
advanced years. The analyst inquires minutely into the shades of
complexion of all the patient's _inamorati_ in a manner that recalls the
familiar "I see a dark man coming over deep water" of the tea-leaves in
the tea-cup stage of one's experience.

After the patient has sternly and heroically resisted the temptation to
invent in the interest of her own self-respect, and also in mitigation
of the ill-concealed contempt of the masculine practitioner for the
paucity of her experience, a few more numerous and more romantic
emotional episodes than have actually been doled out to her by a
penurious fate, and has completed the short and simple annals of her
poverty-stricken heart history, and after the incredulous inquisitor has
become at last convinced that there is indeed nothing more to be told,
this chapter is closed, and then begins the regime of dreams and "free
association."

* * * * *

The interpreting of one's dreams seems to furnish the doctor with a
secret source of amusement that he tries in vain to dissemble, and as
one is only too glad to make up to him in some measure for the hours of
obvious boredom that he has endured while listening to one's _apologia
pro vita sua_, one indulges him by forming the careful habit of grasping
firmly by the tail every elusive dream as it tries to whisk around the
corner of consciousness during one's first waking moments, pulling it
painfully and resistingly back for close and detailed scrutiny, and
laboriously committing to memory and subsequently describing its every
feature and function at the next matinee performance at which one makes
an appearance.

The chastening discovery of the dreamer who relates his dreams to the
professional interpreter is that all that has been carefully withheld
from revelation in the related autobiography, is disclosed with the most
embarrassing crudity, and that secret sins of which one was quite
unconscious are displayed with mortifying clarity. The dream is a
mechanism for letting the cat out of the bag, all kinds of strange cats,
of the existence of which their harborer was often unaware.

Dreams seem to reveal the dreamer as a hypocritical, evasive,
self-deluding coward, unable to face the commonest facts of life, or to
call a spade anything less innocent than a parasol, or even to confront
his own friends and acquaintances, except by forcing them to masquerade
under some so-called "surrogate" form.

My previous personal experience had led me to identify a surrogate as
some kind of judge, but I soon learned that this narrow and technical
meaning must be replaced by the more general signification of
"substitute," though why the word substitute should not be considered
good enough to use in this connection, I never learned. This is but one
of the many examples of the perverse preference of the technicians of
the new science for strange distortions of words with well recognized
and frequently quite different meanings in common parlance. It comes as
somewhat of a shock to the beginner to hear all emotion summarily
classified as "sexual," normal filial or parental affection designated
as "incestuous," friendship as "homosexual," self-respect as
"narcissistic" and the life force or will to power as "the libido."
Soon, however, one becomes as resigned to this strong language as to the
evolutionary hypothesis, and finds it a no more unpalatable thought that
all emotion is derived from sex than that all human beings are descended
from an apelike ancestor. That this common use of the exaggerated
statement leaves no adequate expression for the more intense emotions
fails to disturb a cult that apparently regards all differences of
feeling as of degree rather than of kind.

* * * * *

The narration of dreams puts slight work on the dreamer, and sorely
taxes the mental resources and the ingenuity of the interpreter, but the
real labor, the strenuous and unremitting toil to which the unhappy
victim of this ritual is subjected by a pitiless practitioner is in the
rigors of what goes by the disingenuous name of "free association." This
may sound like some pleasant if not spicy and highly unconventional
pastime, but is in fact and literally a procrustean bed of torture. The
helpless patient is forced to remove her bonnet and shawl and recline
upon a couch with her eyes closed. Her merciless tormentor retires to a
comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. There, because he is out
of sight of the patient, he is supposed, according to the workings of
the mysterious masculine psychology, to be entirely removed from her
consciousness, so that she can concentrate her mind on nothingness, just
as if she were alone by the fireside. Then he starts in with something
like the following initiation of the third degree: "What are your
associations with the word authority?" You are supposed to respond to
this irrelevant inquiry with something like the following idiotic
emanations, "Government–Washington–the President–Mrs.
Wilson–orchids–grandfather's greenhouse," and if you are entirely
resigned to making a fool of yourself, and can abandon yourself to the
spirit of this child's play, this is what you finally learn to do, after
many strenuous efforts to play the game, and the final attainment of a
reasonable self-stultification.

If, however, as is likely to be the case, you are a more or less
feminine person, instinctively unwilling to exhibit your mind in
_deshabille_, and fatuously intent with a persistency worthy of a better
cause on making a good impression on the only person present, you learn
to use these opportunities to tell him everything to your credit that
you can think of, and by carefully working out, preferably in advance, a
chain of passable associations, to present yourself, your character, and
your career in the most favorable light. The wide range of possibilities
in this process that are open to the designing patient seems to be
scarce dreamt of in the philosophy of the gross masculine mind.

* * * * *

This brings me by easy and inevitable stages to the important topic of
the "transference." To the unenlightened this may be defined as the mock
modest and deceptive designation invented by the psychoanalyst for the
more or less ardent affection for himself that he cold-bloodedly sets
out to inspire in his victim. The doctor, for the benefit of his
patient, temporarily transfers to himself and appropriates the devotion
which normally belongs to father, brother, husband, son or lover. To be
sure, it is to remembered that as there is no such word as friendship in
the psychoanalytic vocabulary, an attitude of confidence or admiration
must be represented in terms of a deeper sentiment.

Of course what happens is that the patient mistakes for an attachment of
the heart what is in reality only an intimacy of the mind, because such
an abandon of reserve is indissolubly associated in the feminine mind
with the ties of affection. According to the true Jamesian psychology,
she loves because she confides, instead of confiding because she loves.
How a poor man patient manages can only be surmised, but there are
indications that the knowing of the sex furtively seek the ministrations
of a woman analyst.

* * * * *

Apparently the theory on which all the varied forms of this treatment
are based is that the catharsis of the mind is essential to mental
health, the emptying of all that is in it, the expulsion of dead matter.
The nausea of the soul is relieved like its physical analogue by freeing
it from the undigested matter, the "repressions," that lie so heavily
upon it. The self-contained nature that refrains from spilling over and
strives to maintain itself without recourse to the safety valve of
confidence must in the end unload its burden.

After the destructive process is completed and the ground cleared for
the constructive measures that are to rear the temple of the "_mens sana
in corpore sano_," the heavier half of the work remains to be done; for
the gigantic task to which the practitioner of the new prophylaxis sets
himself is nothing less than the reconstruction of the character of the
patient. Indeed, a recent work on psychoanalysis has for its title _The
Mechanisms of Character Formation_. The conversions that the Rev. Mr.
Sunday and his less notable peers are wont to accomplish in an hour,
these painstaking scientists patiently bring about in from some scores
to some thousands of hours of equally strenuous labor. I am informed
that the cure of the first case of a certain type undertaken by one of
these under-studies of the Eternal, actually consumed two thousand
hours, and that the cure of the specific disease required the entire
reconstruction of the character of the sufferer. Presumably the bill for
"professional services" involved in this beatification was $20,000. One
wonders whether the character that resulted was worth the price. The
consulting room of the psychoanalyst is the new Beauty Parlor where
those dissatisfied with their mental and moral physiognomy may have the
lines of stress and strain smoothed away, and may gain the roses and
lilies of a rejuvenated spiritual complexion. Unhappily I am unable to
speak at length and with authority on this phase of the treatment; for I
am at present only just entering upon the period of metamorphosis. I see
dimly, "as through a glass darkly," my own apotheosis looming ahead, but
the road to that celestial height looks a long and weary and appallingly
expensive journey.

It is the time element that perhaps most impresses and depresses the
student of the new prophylaxis. In a recent paper by a competent
psychiatrist the writer refers as follows to the impracticability of
studying a group of cases in a public hospital on the plan of getting
the patients to understand and explain their own difficulties:

At the rate at which the best of the psychoanalysts work, it
would not be possible properly to study in the course of the
year more than a dozen cases. Furthermore, the results of such
work are of importance purely for the individual, and no
generalization can be drawn therefrom…. Also, no
generalization being possible, it is a matter of piece work;
to study one hundred cases according to this method would
require the efforts of fifteen to twenty psychologists on full
time for many months.

In the opinion of the faithful, Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis,
is to psychiatry what Darwin was to biology, but as Darwin's theory of
evolution required more aeons than the geologists were able to oblige
him with, so Freud's method requires more time than the calendar
affords. Darwin's theory of the variation of species had to be modified
by the theory of mutations or sports. Freud's methods, to be workable,
must be adapted in some way to the indisputable fact that there are only
twenty-four hours in the day, and only three hundred and sixty-five days
in the year.

A careful mathematical calculation of the number of hours required to
cure a psychosis by this new prophylaxis reveals an alarming
disproportion between the minute number of physicians available, and the
incalculable number of patients requiring their ministrations. One of
the most ardent devotees of the new method is a practitioner who,
according to the testimony of a confrere, enters upon his daily
endurance test at 9 A. M. and without any luncheon psychoanalyzes
continuously until 7 P. M. As the ordinary patient is supposed to
require three hours a week of this treatment, for about five months, the
doctor can, by working ten hours a day, treat twenty patients in one
week, or allowing him two months vacation in summer (and he will need
it) handle forty patients in one year. This, alas, is but a drop of
medicine in the bucket of disease, and unless, by some homeopathic
adaptation of the five-hundredth-dilution principle, we can make our
medicine go farther it is only a limited number of the rich and leisure
class who can ever be cured by these new methods. This is the
prostrating situation that confronts the humanitarian–a little group of
healers bravely but hopelessly taking up arms against a sea of mental
troubles.

One cannot help wondering whether such exhaustive thoroughness is really
essential. It seems sometimes to the disillusioned seeker after truth
that the relation of the conscious life history, the revelation of the
unconscious through dreams, the display of the mental processes through
"free association," are but the hocus-pocus devised for keeping up the
conversation between the analyst and the analyzed–a crude, clumsy,
masculine technique for discovering, by somewhat labyrinthine methods,
the essence of the personal quality of an individual. Might not this be
obvious in a few hours of ordinary intercourse to a person of intuition,
practised in the art of plucking the heart out of a mystery, instead of
chopping up the whole anatomy to get at it?

The expenditure of time and effort and money required to gain the occult
ends of what seems like a blind and blundering process, is certainly
colossal. What the patient puts into it is comparatively unimportant. A
fool and his money might as well be parted sooner as later, and the time
of the patient, especially in the state of depression in which he
ordinarily seeks treatment, is worth so little that killing it is as
good a use as any to make of it. But think of the physician–a man of
parts, of much general and special education, who has added to a large
professional equipment the complicated technique of a laborious method
that only a German thoroughness gone stark and staring mad, could
perpetrate on a makeshift world, which, with all its failings, has not
lost its sense of humor or its perception of the relative value of
things mundane, and does still discriminate between time and eternity.
Think of a first rate mind expending itself for hours on end in the
minute scrutiny of some trivial neurotic mentality, probably as like as
two peas to thousands of other equally insignificant particles of matter
that pass for individual organisms.

* * * * *

If indeed the interest in another personality is the essence of the
"cure," one is tempted to ask why these egocentric erotomaniacs should
not derive the same and mutual benefit from interesting themselves in
one another? Why not pair them off, male and female as originally
created, and embark them together on this ark of refuge from the deluge
of the common life in which they are drowning? Let them sit by the hour,
the day, the week, and talk about their "souls," relate to each other's
absorbed attention their life history, interpret each other's dreams,
and join in the freest of "free association." Let the blind lead the
blind, the sick heal the sick, the erotic love the erratic, and silly
soul mate with silly soul, leaving the authentic souls of the doctors to
be saved from stultification, and their talents used for the benefit of
human beings who are really and truly suffering.

But, alas, there seems to be no such easy panacea for mortal ills: for
to attain its ends the process must apparently be presided over by a
superior if not superhuman intelligence. And the patient, if
scientifically or benevolently minded, can take comfort in the thought
that his case is perhaps sufficiently different from any hitherto
handled to enable the investigator to benefit almost as much as the
patient by the experience. Perhaps the months that the biddable patient
who has overcome his "resistances" devotes to cooeperating with the
scientific explorer, may be reduced to weeks in the treatment of the
next like-minded individual who submits himself for treatment by the
more practised practitioner. I recall my despairing comment upon a
doctor's tale of the case that it took two thousand hours to cure, and
the reassuring response that, now that the technique had been worked out
and published, any competent person could turn the trick in from
one-tenth to one-twentieth of the time.

* * * * *

The psychoanalytic approach to mental prophylaxis is perhaps still,
after twenty years of groping progress, in the experimental stage. The
few bold spirits who have braved the ridicule of their conservative
confreres, and left the main travelled roads, are hardy pioneers blazing
trails and treading out paths that will in time be easy traveling. It is
inevitable that in the delicate operations by which these spiritual
sawbones are mastering the mystery of this new art of the vivisection of
the soul, they should sometimes cause pain or even cut in the wrong
place. But they are inspired by a very human sympathy for their
victim-beneficiaries, and are rapidly learning their way about the
spiritual anatomy, and discovering the skillful use of mental
anaesthetics.

The strangest thing about this extraordinary process is that it really
does cure the mind diseased. Where and what, one asks, and continues to
ask, is the nexus between treatment and cure. Has any patient, however
completely recovered, ever found out? Do the practitioners of this
occult ritual know themselves, or have they simply hit on a practical
technique, without a comprehension of a rational philosophical basis for
its major operations? Is this like early groping experiments with
"animal magnetism," or mysterious forms of electricity which brought
results long before an understanding of the reason of their success was
arrived at? However this may be, it still remains true that, judged by
its results, the new method, however dark and devious, must still be
acknowledged to have attained a success, not sporadic and accidental,
but continuous, consistent and increasing, and apparently, though
incomprehensibly, connected as effect to cause with the procedure which
has been sketched, or shall I say caricatured, in the foregoing pages.

"THE PUREST OF HUMAN PLEASURES"

Top-heavy civilization is always righting itself by a side-reach after
the "primitive" and the "elemental." Weary capitalists and professional
men play–expensively–at what when all's said is but a child's game of
ball enhanced by feats of walking. Science gives us the motor; and
slug-a-beds who have hitherto accepted sunrise as an act of faith grow
to be connoisseurs in effects of morning haze and chiaroscuro.

Perhaps, then, there are many others who, like myself, have discovered,
in this year of the travail of humanity, the sober and healing pleasures
of the garden. Of course I had always intended to have a garden
sometime, on the same principle by which I hope to see Japan, to read
the Old Testament in Hebrew (having first mastered a dozen other
languages more immediately relevant to my business), to have my twilight
stage of knowledge regarding the material universe dispelled by the
blinding light of modern discovery. I had even used the planning of this
garden, with its companion brook, grove, and lawn, as a lure for sleep.
But that was a paradise for the eye alone; and in my heathen blindness I
dreamed that the joy of the garden was in the beholding. Most pityingly
I look back upon that time of ignorance. Confess, fellow amateurs, is
not the joy in the making? Even harvesting, the end for which the garden
was made, yields the gardener himself a crasser pleasure, as compared
with the stirring of the earth, laying down seeds in a row like a string
of matched stones, and most of all watching the young plants, obedient
to his design, prick through the earth and advance from seed-leaf to
bushiness or stateliness, from foliage to flower. To gather the fruits
of your labor justifies your enterprise, but it is something like
receiving royalties for a work of art born in a flash of inspiration. To
see the delicate green shoots, perfect in their vague promise, and
innocent of the blights, distortions, and frustrations that may overtake
them later on, stretching up and unfolding where the other day there was
only black earth, is akin to the first vision of some great creative
idea, before one meets its penalty in hours of toil and cheated hope.
There is even a tinge of guilt in our pleasure; we have digressed, in
the name of civic duty, from our lawful callings, considering that we
made some sacrifice of time or strength, and our virtue has turned into
an indulgence.

One of my first discoveries (after the simplest rudiments of the art I
essayed to practise) was that of all topics on the lips of men the
garden is the most conversable, the most fraternal. Hitherto,
observation had led me to suppose children and rheumatism the most
universal of interests. Having neither myself, I have been cut off from
that fluent intercourse upon first steps and first words, adenoids,
preventive dentistry, potatoes carried in the pocket, baths of hot
brine, and the proportion of protein in the diet, which makes strangers
or friends akin. There was always the weather; but–unless one has a
garden, as sensitive as a poet to every nuance of sun or
atmosphere–talk of the weather is a mere subterfuge, a symbol of our
inarticulateness and awkward shyness masking our human yearning to know
our fellows and to wish them well. The garden, as a subject of
discourse, combines all the pretext offered by the weather to hint our
good will without violating our shyness; all the diversity and perpetual
surprise of a child's development; all the right to condole with
misfortune and to be agreeably officious about remedies enjoyed by those
who encounter the rheumatic; all the delight of professional
note-comparing known to invalids, cooks, and pedagogues. To appear in my
garden, equipped with sun-hat and hoe, was, I found, to be hail-fellowed
by every condition of men–pickaninnies, delivery-men, professors,
elegants and inelegants, experts and inexperts. My acquaintanceship
among my neighbors grew like Jonah's gourd. "Do you mind my asking what
that line of white strips is for?" "To warn the English sparrows off my
pea-vines."–"Would you like some young cabbage-plants?"–"Your corn is
lookin' fine!" Common interests were visible and inexhaustible.

* * * * *

Other sociabilities also I have found in the garden. We prate a good
deal of "companionship with nature," and go out fussily to seek it, with
camera, bird-book, field-glasses, and expensive camping gear. In the
garden one loses all this self-consciousness. Instead of personifying
nature, and offering her the compliment of man's society, one sinks into
one's place as a piece of nature. The catbird spluttering joyous music
at me, almost forgetting to be afraid; the cardinal that looks down where
I stand tossing off a magnificent plume of spray from my watering-pot,
and whistles, "We-e-ell! Who'd-have-thought-to-see-you-keeping-at-it?"
and I myself, turning to my own uses the perpetual need of life to renew
itself, to evolve out of seed and bulb new seeds and bulbs, which shall
give birth in time to other seeds and bulbs–we are all part of the same
process.

With our Little Brother the Robin I am approaching intimacy. It is
pleasant to see him assume, with almost human egotism, that the worms I
turn up, the strings I plant by, the stakes I drive, are special
providences for himself. Yet I have never quite won his confidence. I
have often longed to speak to him, explaining that there are worms
enough for us both, and how easy I find it to scatter a few extra
strings for his nest-building; I have longed to reassure the wild doves
who run about on their pretty pink feet in the long grass near the
garden, and at my approach fly away with a protesting soft
"chitter-chitter-chitter." I realize afresh, as I have often realized in
watching people coax squirrels to eat from their hands, or children
lavishing affection on brainless hens and rabbits, that if there had
been no Saint Francis, it behooved mankind to invent him. On the other
hand, the gardener, a fighter in the struggle for food, finds the
impartial views of the dilettante asking for "companionship with nature"
quite unthinkable. The wild rabbit, which only last winter I thought an
engaging creature, has not changed the sleekness of his brown coat, his
funny little white tuft of tail, or his wavelike movements; but he has
become repulsive to me.

A whole new set of values, in fact, takes possession of mind and senses.
One comes to like the writhings of the angle worms in the muck, knowing
that they do the gardener service. Various sights and contacts, once
offensive, being now considered not simply in themselves, but in
relation to our purposes, become indifferent or actually pleasurable.
Even whiffs of fertilizer, if suggestive merely, give an agreeable sense
that the work is going forward. And what an infinite gulf between "dirt"
and "soil"! There lies between a whole initiation into secrets chemical
and biological. Once I passed by garden tracts with undistinguishing
eyes. Now to see them stifled with weeds, or to see the earth stiff and
lumpy, affects me like walking in New York slums, or like a hideous
grouping of colors; to see the earth mellow and finely tilled is
satisfying, like a good chord in music, or like a firm strong drawing.

Digging, planting, transplanting, watching the sky, I have come face to
face with the meaning of words I have known all my life, in the dim way
we know most things outside our own importunate concerns. "Except a corn
of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone." It is one
thing to understand this saying botanically, and another to see it
exemplified when you are breathlessly awaiting the result. "An enemy
hath done this!" I cried when the wild rabbit stripped my young
bean-plants, or when some great dog made his bed in my onion-patch. All
sorts of images, from parable, poem, and story, re-awake in my mind with
a morning freshness and brightness. And in my turn I have enacted, or
experienced, many a little apologue. For example, I discover that plants
grown in over-shaded spots fall victim no less surely to what sun they
get, on scorching days, than those quite unprotected. Here are the
facts; the moralist may make of them what he will.

* * * * *

What would any art be without its disappointments and anxieties, its
hours of depression that measure the worth of the goal striven for? The
amateur gardener has his share. I pass over in forgiving silence–almost
silence–the haughty fashion in which the masters of the craft,
professing to offer information, so give as to withhold. Your
professional is a thorough classicist; "nothing too much" his motto.
Enough, and not too much, whether it be vanilla in the cookies, exercise
for the invalid, "corroborative detail" in the narrative, or sunshine,
water, fertilizer, depth of earth, mulching for your plants. And this
all-important but inscrutable rule is the despair of every amateur. A
grievance perhaps more personal to myself has been the unnatural
behavior enjoined on me toward seedlings of my own sowing, my own
cosseting. In a sense, I had brought them into the world, and now I was
told some of them must be done away with, that the rest might thrive! As
I edged along the rows, unhappily choosing, among all the pretty
youngsters, the victims for the sacrifice, I reminded myself of Catiline
('tis consoling, at last to have a use for one's education); _notat et
designat oculis ad caedem unumquemque_. Sometimes my human instinct to
value every individual and to lavish care on the weak has got the better
of me. I do not dwell on the experiments to which I have resorted; but
some of them, in spite of the doctrinaires, were triumphs! On the other
hand, I have bitterly resented deformities and discolorations in my
nursery. For the first time in my life I understand how the Spartans
could expose for death infants blemished in mind or body. I understand
what fierce parental pride is at the bottom of many a father's or
mother's blindness to faults and commonplaceness.

On every side I hear from fellow-enthusiasts detailed schemes for next
year's garden, vows of perpetual gardendom. I do not echo them. I have
been initiated; a certain bond with my kind is mine henceforth. But the
purest of human pleasures, as Bacon called it, is likewise the most
tyrannous. Other joys may be caught up in Gideon's fashion, while one
marches on one's way. Once the garden possesses you, it leaves no room
for anything beside. The garden-seat of Adam and Eve has been
universally regretted. But what had they to do except name the
creatures, dig, sow, and reap? They did not have to pay their way with
money, nor answer letters, nor read the newspapers, nor vote, nor keep
track of the bacterial count in the milk they drank, nor study past
history in order to interpret the present, nor even to learn the science
of horticulture.

WAR FOR EVOLUTION'S SAKE

In its last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man
is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean
measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its
incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting
and degrading methods of its conduct bear the "made in Germany" stamp,
so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear
the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg
gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of
his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of
German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the
conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall
explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in
beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to
the winner, nothing to the loser.

In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are
the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among
these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a
constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest
like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its
increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the
peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of
longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning,
wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the
other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.

Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and
the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural selection on a basis
of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the
whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God
that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting
and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all
those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an
artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to
human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted
is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the
principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature's principle is mutual fight
and antagonism.

Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly
repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed
foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy.
In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they
needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people;
namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of
scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. The _Gott_ of the
German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German
success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth from
_Gott und uns_; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.

I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in
a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second
impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of
the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was
well illustrated by the conditions of the moment–and it was a memorable
one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the
land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in
tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and
cunning, apparently winning in this biological struggle for
existence,–and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No
wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought
to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its
evolution in harmony with natural law.

But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German
logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy
justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst
and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at
the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of
freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged
natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he
deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his
philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many
educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their
Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.

First we can say of this natural law that it isn't natural law.
Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural
selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle
is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth
and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute
evolution.

The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of
biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal
that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant
part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and
results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our
realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of
evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.

The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can
be, looked on in a light free from control by dogma. When this is done
the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more
than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day.

* * * * *

Let us glance over the history of the doctrine.

The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on
the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination.
Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the
evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the
first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer
formulations of the present and just passed centuries.

Even the essence of Darwin's famous explanation of evolution by natural
selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic
philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who
conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of
kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable
organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as
successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural
conditions.

But it was the great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, who first
expressed the evolution conception in fully worked out and reasonable
form, while it was Lamarck who first offered a simple and wholly
plausible explanation of evolutionary cause and control. His explanation
remains to-day the simplest and most appealing to the reasoning mind of
any that has been offered.

Unfortunately it lacked, and still lacks, the necessary basis of
indispensable proof for its most fundamental assumption, to-wit, "the
inheritance of acquired characters," that is, the inheritance by the
immediate offspring of those structural and functional changes or
"acquirements" which came to the parents during their life because of
their special use or disuse of parts and their individual reactions to
environmental conditions. The young giraffe had a longer neck than it
otherwise would have had because its parents had stretched their necks
by continual reaching up to the leaves on the highest branches. The
young man-thing of Glacial Times had weaker and less developed scalp
muscles because its parents had gradually given up any considerable use
of these muscles for twitching their heavy shocks of hair to frighten
away the flies.

Then came Darwin with his natural selection explanation, a very
different explanation from Lamarck's, and one also very plausible and
logical. Darwin did not altogether disbelieve in Lamarck's theory; but
he believed much more in his own. Later came the Neo-Darwinians, and
they went the whole way of rejecting Lamarck's explanation entirely, and
accepting the natural selection explanation as the wholly sufficient
cause and the only one needed to explain all evolution. The leader of
the Neo-Darwinians was August Weismann of the University of Freiburg. He
had as followers most of the German natural philosophers.

What is this "natural selection" that we all know so well by name, and
so little, I am afraid, by content? For natural selection is much more
widely known as a dominating scientific dogma, accepted popularly with
little question as a sufficient explanation of evolution, than as
something to be itself explained and viewed with a proper scientific
doubt. As a matter of fact, it is high time that it should be generally
known that not many naturalists of standing today accept natural
selection as a sufficient explanation of the thoroughly accepted fact of
evolution, or even as the most important among the numerous probable
contributing factors of evolution. Indeed there are many reputable
naturalists who repudiate natural selection altogether, as an actual
contributing factor in species-forming and descent, and concede its
influence as an evolutionary control, only in most general relations.

But in the popularization and wide acceptance of the natural selection
dogma, we are in face of one of those familiar histories of the rise and
dominance of a plausible, logically-constructed, apparently simple and
sufficient explanation of a great problem pressing for solution. It is
difficult for the world to accept the evolution theory without a causal
explanation of it. But as the known facts prove the theory beyond
reasonable doubt, it is necessary to accept it. Hence there is to most
people a simultaneous necessity for accepting some explanation of it.
Natural selection has had the fortune of being, since Darwin's time, the
generally accepted explanation. What then is it, really?

It is an explanation of evolution which it is the merit of Darwin to
have devised;–or perhaps we ought already to say in the light of the
fatal results brought about by the wide unreasoning acceptance of it, it
is the demerit of Darwin to have devised;–an explanation based partly
on certain observed facts, but more largely on a certain logical
elaboration of argument for which the observed facts are assumed to be
sufficient base.

The more relevant of these facts are the production by parents of too
many young and the slight differing of these young among themselves in
most of their characters, physical and mental. The production of too
many young leads, according to the natural selectionists, to a life and
death struggle for existence among them, and the slight differences
among them lead to a decision in this struggle on a basis of the slight
advantages or disadvantages of these differences. The two logical
conclusions seem to be inevitable on the basis of the two facts.

On the structure so far reared, however, other blocks are placed. The
selectionists believe that by the laws of heredity, although the young
of a different parent or pair of parents do differ among themselves,
they resemble their own parents more closely than they resemble other
individuals of their kind of species. So that the young produced by the
survivors in the struggle for existence, although again slightly
differing from their parents and each other, will, by the laws of
heredity, tend to reproduce in their make-up the advantageous variations
which were possessed by their parents and which gave these parents
success in the struggle for life.

More than that: some of these young will tend to possess those
advantageous differences–this by the laws of variation as antidote
needed just here for the laws of heredity–in even more marked degree
than existed in the parents, while others will possess them in less
degree and still others in about the same degree. Hence, the particular
young showing the increased differences will be the individuals of this
generation to survive in the struggle. These will then leave behind them
new young again tending to possess in varying degree those advantageous
variations from the old or species type that make them especially "fit
for the conditions under which they must live."

Thus there will result, in a series of many generations, a gradual
shifting of the character of the species to the type characterized by an
ever increasing and perfecting of the original advantageous differences.
This is "species transformation," or the "origin of species" by natural
selection. It is evolution on a basis of life and death struggle;
extinction of the unfit; and survival of the fit, fitter or fittest. And
just as with the different individuals inside the species, so with the
different varying species. Each struggles with the other and the one or
ones with the advantageous differences win at the expense of the others.

There is no doubt of the fascinating plausibility and seeming reality
and sufficiency of this explanation. It makes a strong appeal to the
logical mind; to the theory-spinning brain. You can understand it, prove
it, expand it, improve on it, and, all this almost without ever seeing
an animal or a plant, or knowing anything of its actual life and
relations to the world it lives in. No wonder it fascinated and seized a
world demanding a logical explanation for the theory of evolution. No
wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a
clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready
for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a
scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.

* * * * *

Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific
dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are
many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things
cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt
them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but
loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many
people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that
many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most
certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as
yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific
man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster
and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to
know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man
knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not
be.

It was Weismann's new facts and new theories about heredity that did
much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational
Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an
insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now
it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete
knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible
and absurd the German claims of the _Allmacht_ of natural selection as
evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of
the potent causes and controls of evolution–if we may call that
revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The
factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others
are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do
not understand.

If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist
and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest
scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.

The new heredity, to characterize by this term the extraordinary
increase and the more exact kind of knowledge of heredity acquired since
the first recognition, in 1900, of Mendelism, has so shattered the
seemingly unassailable logical structure of the natural selection
explanation of evolution that it stands now only as a tottering skeleton
of its once imposing self. It had always too much assumption of premises
for its foundation and too much logic and finespun theory in its
superstructure to be an enduring building. Even before the new knowledge
of the facts and mechanism of heredity was available natural selection
was already weakening under the criticism of scientific men, although
but little of this was known to the man in the street. And even now when
the new heredity has furnished the knowledge for a complete undermining
of the natural selection theory as a species-forming factor, only
occasional rumors of the disaster find their way into popular
literature.

But long ago there began a popular revolt against the conception of the
whole world of nature and man as ruled by a theory of continuous
ruthless bloody struggle. Everyone knew that this was not the only
relation of human beings to each other, and even most casual observation
indicated that it was not the only relation of various kinds of the
lower animals to each other. The obvious biological success of the
social or communal insects, the numerous instances of commensalism, or
the living together on terms of mutual advantage of individuals of
different species–the various ants alone have more than a thousand
known kinds of other insects living with them–and the innumerable
observed instances of what might be called balanced adaptations, such as
those of the flower-visiting insects and the insect-visited flowers
resulting in the needed cross-fertilization of the flowers and the
needed supply of nectar and pollen food for the insects–all these had
convinced biologists and nature-students and just nature-lovers that
_if_ natural selection were the all-ruling factor in determining the
present character and the future of the living world it was a very
different natural selection from that so redly painted by the
Neo-Darwinians.

It is quite certain that Darwin himself never conceived of any such
utterly brutal conception of natural selection as the Teutonized one. In
all his writing he recognizes that the bringing about of adaptation to
the conditions of life is the essential feature of evolution, and, when
it seemed impossible or too far-fetched to explain adaptation by a
ruthless struggle that extinguished some species and preserved others,
he looked for other explanations, even accepting Lamarck's for certain
cases. He accepted everything that could make for adaptation, and among
these other things than bitter fighting that could bring about and
perfect adaptation he especially recognized mutual aid, and repeatedly
called attention to species change based on mutual aid both within and
between species.

But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with
the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection
extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to
bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune
conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis
of an alleged identity between the character and control of human
evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the
Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy
and war practise.

The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always
contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in
line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted
pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It
is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal
descended, or ascended, from the lower ones–as he is–and if animals
are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by
virtue–or evil–of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle,
out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully
qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human
evolution is simple. _Schluss_ with discussion!

But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the
premises. They are wrong.

Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the
chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the
chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier
life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as "animal among animals," and
despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape
ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing,
ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human
nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and
especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure
mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of
every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation,
leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our
seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have
begun the course of our truly human evolution we have come an immensely
long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all
to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition
in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection
into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of
elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning
days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that
we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical
characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits,
and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity;
and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made
possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but
concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters,
which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech,
writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one
generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in
the race.

This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of
the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid
principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly
swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today
contains all the present expression and future promise of man's higher
evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man's natural traits,
and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its
natural validity in the great strength it adds to man's position in
Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of
human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of
natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate
into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance
and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.

Now it is all this side of human evolution that the German natural
philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out
of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social
evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the
sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and
viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to
be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly
and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible
to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of
military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological
advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal
and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.

The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are
being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their
thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their
defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They
have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor
at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said
that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to
work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the
artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be
restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at
least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a
world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the
probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were
fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and
biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare
possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility
came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one,
would not care to live longer in it.

I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of
biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But
there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not
only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do;
they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition
is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as
long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with
promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are
too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility
of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has
suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.

The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this
war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies
have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany
but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will
not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon
with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But
there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men
who have sacrificed them in vain.

But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who
have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and
that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to
be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with
them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the
Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful
philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands.
And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger
of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.

JOHN FISKE

A generation with every nerve strained by the war will probably have
little patience with a statement that the generation whose activities
began soon after the middle of the last century, went through a conflict
of perhaps equal importance, but such is the fact.

Like the present conflict, that was one between an old and firmly rooted
principle that had outlived most of its usefulness and was fettering
liberty, and a new principle that meant emancipation.

The contest was between the superstition (it was not consistent enough
to justify calling it an opinion) on the one hand that man has fallen
from a condition of primitive perfection to one of degradation, and on
the other hand, the scientific demonstration that man's experience has
been one of virtually constant progress, up from protoplasm and probably
from inorganic matter. On the former view hung the mass of putrescent
and pestilent dogma that had fastened itself upon the sweet and simple
teachings of Christ.

The conflict was probably the greatest of all between truth and
superstition. The temper of it was perhaps most strikingly illustrated
when, at the meeting of the British Association in 1860, Bishop
Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was "through his grandfather or his
grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey," and Huxley answered:

"I asserted–and I repeat–that a man has no reason to be ashamed of
having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I
should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man–a man of
restless and versatile intellect–who not content with success in his
own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he
has no real acquaintance, only to obscure by an aimless rhetoric, and
distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by
eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

A witness says: "The effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to
be carried out; I, for one jumped from my seat."

Another witness says: "I never saw such a display of fierce party
spirit," and speaks of "the looks of bitter hatred" cast upon those who
were on Huxley's side.

Perhaps it is not trying to shape great complexities too definitely, to
say that the conflict of which that was one episode, was the third of
the civilized world's greatest intellectual struggles–the establishment
of the Christian church, the reformation of it, and the determination of
its true relation to the progress of knowledge.

The last conflict, however, was a most hopeful illustration of the
progress made since the first two, in that it involved no exposure of
victims to the lions of the arena, no Nero's torches, no Inquisition, no
Thirty-Years' War, no destruction of venerable and beautiful monuments,
or of institutions for charity or education.

But of course that conflict of the last century, like all others, had
its pains; yet as it did not directly touch the person or the pocket of
the average man, he cared very little about it. Nevertheless it has
filtered down into his very language, and when he is the sort of average
man who likes to use big words, his share of the victors' spoils
includes the pleasure of frequently uttering, without quite
understanding, such terms as _environment_, _differentiation_, and even
_integration_, while the word _evolution_ has become such a
matter-of-course term that he and everybody else use it
unconsciously–unconscious not only of most of what it implies, but even
of their indebtedness to the men from whom they got it.[2]

[2] In this connection there was something said about
Herbert Spencer in our Number 16.

Of those men, one of the most important, and far the most important in
America, was John Fiske. The recent publication of his _Life and
Letters, by John S. Clarke_, (Houghton-Mifflin Co.) gives occasion to
say something about him and his part in the great conflict.

But first a word regarding the book. It is certainly a remarkable
production for a man well over eighty. Though not entirely free from the
diffuseness and repetition of age, it is nearer free than many
respectable books of much younger men, while in faithfulness, patience
and, on the whole, discrimination, it surpasses most. The author really
understands the implications of Evolution, so far as yet worked out, and
that is something that surprisingly few people do; and there are not a
few places where he states them with a clearness and vigor which would
do credit to anybody, and in a man of his years are no less than
astonishing. Whatever imperfections the book may have, as a guide for
the layman to the great revolution in thought which brought thought for
the first time into stable equilibrium, the book is probably surpassed
by no writing except Fiske's own.

But while the author's work is not to be estimated lightly, he would be
the first to say that the charm and value of the book are mainly in
Fiske's letters, especially those to his wife and mother, which in
naturalness, vividness, beauty of expression and humor are unsurpassed,
and in wealth and ease of illustrative learning are unequaled, by any
letters of which we know. For readers fond of books of travel, many of
them will be of the very highest interest. Moreover they include a fine
portrait gallery of the greatest men who won the fight for Evolution, at
play as well as at work; and the letters to and from Darwin, Spencer,
and a few others are rich in discussion of the profoundest topics that
have engaged the human mind. In short, we know of no other book which
admits the reader to as much intimacy with as high society. Jenkins
would not agree with our terms, but if high society means the men who
made the greatest intellectual epoch in human history, our assertion is
safe. Fiske himself had no small part in that great feat, and this book
admits us into his intimate friendship with Lyell, Lewes, George Eliot,
Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer and not a few others among the leaders
of the race. It seems quite probable that this life of Fiske may give a
clearer idea of Spencer than is given in Mr. Duncan's _Life_, or even in
the _Autobiography_. Perhaps best of all, Fiske's letters set before us
as example a character of rare simplicity, sincerity and tenderness.

Lest all this praise lead some to disappointment, we hasten to add the
obvious fact that the attractions of cotemporary history or even of
portable epigram, which have made most of the immortal letters in
literature, are hardly to be expected from a writer whose mind was
generally absorbed in the widest generalizations of Philosophy and the
History of the past.

* * * * *

And now as to the life itself:

Edmund Fisk Green, later famous as John Fiske, was born of excellent New
England stock at Hartford, Connecticut, on March 30, 1842. His mother
was early widowed, and went to New York to teach, leaving her son with
her mother in Middletown. When he was thirteen, his mother married in
New York, and this change in her surname probably has something to do
with the change in his, to that originally borne by the grandmother with
whom he continued to live. The grandmother's father, John Fisk, was a
remarkable man, and so his Christian name went with the surname.

The young John Fiske (the _e_ was his own addition when he found that it
had been used by his earlier ancestors) was precocious, as, despite many
assertions to the contrary, great scholars and geniuses generally have
been; but unlike Mill and Spencer–the cotemporaries he nearest
resembled–Fiske had not the benefit in his early education of any
exceptionally competent guide. From childhood up, however, he stood out
from his companions.

He had the usual schooling, interspersed with some special tutoring, and
during two considerable intervals he pursued his studies unaided. All
the while that his formal studies were going on, he read ravenously,
and, from a very early age, only things worth reading. Thus in childhood
he began the accumulation of what became a very exceptional private
library.

When Fiske was fourteen, he joined the Congregational Church in
Middletown, and for a time he was very religious indeed, taking an
active part in the wave of "revival" which swept over the country two
years later, in 1858. But early in 1859 he was reading Gibbon, Grote,
Humboldt, and Buckle, and questioning the dogmas of Christianity, and
quite probably was going through the reaction from the "revival," which,
throughout the country, was about as great as the revival itself; and it
was not long before Fiske abandoned the dogmas altogether. But his
reverence for all in the religion that was worth the attention of a
reasoning being, never left him; and through life he even used its
terminology to a degree that was sometimes hardly consistent with his
fundamental convictions. He became also far the most effective builder
yet known of the new religious superstructure legitimately based on the
philosophy which, at about the time we speak of, was removing from many
minds the traditional bases of religion.

Fiske's infidelity led to his social ostracism in Middletown, but forty
years later, the place had so far advanced that when it celebrated the
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, it invited Fiske
to be the orator of the occasion.

In 1860 he entered Harvard.

Later, of Darwin he said: "There is now and then a mind–perhaps one in
four or five millions–which in early youth thinks the thoughts of
mature manhood." Such a mind was emphatically Fiske's own: while he was
still an undergraduate, two of his essays attracted attention on both
sides of the water.

In college his marks in Philosophy were low: he knew more than his
teachers did, and differed with them, and probably with his textbooks.

He was threatened with expulsion from college for disseminating among
the students seditious ideas, including the doctrine of Evolution. Eight
years later he was invited to expound the same ideas in a course of
lectures in one of the chapels of the university.

A third instance of the revolution in opinion which marked the last
century was the refusal, in 1872, because of Fiske's unorthodoxy, to
invite him to lecture at the Lowell Institute, which was followed less
than twenty years later by invitations to do it. Then the demand for
seats was so great that the evening lectures had to be repeated in
subsequent afternoons.

After graduation, Fiske studied law, did two years' work in nine months,
passed a triumphant examination, and was admitted to the Bar. But after
waiting for clients two years, during which he read more, in quantity
and quality, than most fairly studious men read in a lifetime, and wrote
several notable essays, he gave up law for the pursuits in which he was
already eminent.

But though he gave up the law, nearly eighteen years later he could
write thus to his wife (_Life and Letters_, II, p. 205):

"Judge Gantt thought he would stick me, and so propounded to me the
barbarous law-Latin puzzle propounded by Sir Thomas More to a learned
jurist at Amsterdam, 'whether a plough taken _in withernam_ can be
replevied?' Didn't stick Hezekiah [The author does not give us the
origin of this nickname] _not much_. I gave him a minute account of the
ancient process of distraining and impounding and of the action of
replevin,–considerably to my own amusement and his astonishment."

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 of the Conservation of Force
about 1860. 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 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.

It became plain, too, to all normal minds, that the only conceivable
object of these processes was the production of happiness, and that all
records of them proved that they tend not only to produce happiness, but
to increase it.

These facts rendered entirely superfluous all the previous imaginings of
anthropomorphic deities issuing commands, to obey which was good, and to
disobey which was bad. For all that, was substituted a beneficent Power
transcending man's complete comprehension, but with infinitely greater
claims to gratitude and reverence, and sanctions for morality infinitely
more intelligible and authoritative.

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.