Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 / Volume 1, Number 2

Vol. I.
MARCH, 1887.
No. 2.
If the science of man, the being in whom the spiritual and material worlds are fully represented, and in whom both can be studied in their relations, has been fully (though not completely or finally) developed by the revelation through experiments, of the functions of the brain, then from the establishment of anthropology there necessarily begins a literary revolution, which not only changes all philosophy, but extends through all the realms of literature. There is no realm which can escape the modifying influence of ideas which are at the basis of all conceptions of man, of society, of duty, of religion, of art, of social institutions, of the healing art, education, and government, and the new light which psychometric illumination throws upon all sciences.
The literature of the future will therefore differ widely from the literature of the past, and millions of volumes which still hold their places on the shelves of libraries will in the next century take their proper place in the mouldering mass which interests the antiquarian alone,—the mouldering mass which universities still cherish, and which helps to deaden the rising intelligence of the western world. Let us, as Tennyson says,
“Hope the best, but hold the Present
Fatal daughter of the Past.”
It is self-evident that the farther back we go for intelligence the deeper we plunge in the darkness of ignorance; and even though intuitional and moral truths may be found in the old writings, they belong to a literature imbedded in an ignorance which necessarily darkens all that comes down from such periods.
The benumbing influence of antiquity—or rather of that extended period which may be called the Aristotelian age, the age in which all philosophic thought was utterly benumbed by the Greek literature—has not yet passed away. American writers are just beginning to get rid of their absolute subserviency to foreign models in all things, and in this partial independence they are still subservient to the fundamental philosophic and ethical ideas of the past. The change that is taking place is only in minor matters.