General Remarks.—The beginnings of science in America date from colonial days and have been touched upon by Professor Tyler. The interest of Americans in science has never abated. Readers of standard scientific literature are numerous. The Scientific American, founded in 1845, The Popular Science Monthly, founded in 1872, Science, dating from 1883, and several other journals of science are read by many non-professional persons. The various sciences have, in the last quarter-century at least, won a place of prominence in our college curricula. The number of disinterested scientific observers and investigators has always been large. The largest scientific organisation in the United States, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which developed from the old Association of American Geologists and Naturalists in 1847, now has a membership of over five thousand; and in addition to this and other general scientific bodies there is for workers in nearly every individual science a national organisation, meeting regularly and publishing the results of investigations. In almost every science America has produced scholars of note; in some she has furnished leaders of the world.
This is not, of course, the place, even if the writer were competent to furnish it, for a narrative of American scientific achievement. We can only touch upon a few of the greater names in mental and moral, political and legal, ethnological and linguistic, and natural and physical science.
Mental and Moral Science.—It cannot be said that America has taken a place of pre-eminence in the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century. English, French, and German savants still lead in this realm of thought. Yet American philosophy has made enormous strides in the last half-century and many of its exponents have won universal recognition. Porter and McCosh have expounded the views of the Scottish School; German thought has been elucidated and criticised by Harris, Bowne, and Royce; the writings of Draper, Fiske, and Schurman on the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer are well known. The psychologists Ladd, Stanley Hall, Baldwin, Titchener, and James have international reputations. In the number and equipment of her psychological laboratories America leads the world. The number of periodicals devoted to psychology, ethics, and cognate sciences is considerable. Philosophical studies enjoy great favour at our universities, both as electives and as required subjects. Some of the men briefly considered below are perhaps more famous as teachers than as writers; yet all have left their mark on the philosophical thought of their day.
Francis Wayland.—Francis Wayland (1796–1865), a Baptist clergyman and for twenty-eight years (1827–1855) president of Brown University, wrote several well-known works on moral and political science. After graduating from Union College in 1813, he studied medicine and began practice at Troy, New York; but from 1816 on devoted himself to the ministry. His “Elements of Moral Science” (1835), his greatest work, was long a standard text-book. “The Elements of Political Economy” appeared in 1837; “Limitations of Human Reason,” in 1840; “Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System of the United States,” in 1842; and “Elements of Intellectual Philosophy,” in 1854. Wayland is most important as a teacher of morals. For him education and religion went hand in hand. Although he was not a thinker of the highest order, his treatises were lucid, exact, and attractive. He was one of the great educational and religious leaders of his day.
Mark Hopkins.—Another great educator was Mark Hopkins (1802–1887), whose birthplace was Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and who graduated from Williams College in 1824. Like Wayland, he first practised medicine, then became a minister and teacher of moral philosophy. He was professor of moral philosophy at Williams for fifty-seven years, and president from 1836 till 1872. He wrote “The Influence of the Gospel in Liberalising the Mind” (1831), “The Connexion between Taste and Morals” (1841), “The Evidences of Christianity” (Lowell Institute lectures, 1844), “Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews” (1847), “Moral Science” (also Lowell lectures, 1862), “The Law of Love and Love as a Law” (1869), “An Outline Study of Man” (1873), “Strength and Beauty” (1874), and “The Scriptural Idea of Man” (1883). Few men in America have been more potent as intellectual and moral forces than was Mark Hopkins. President Garfield used to say that a student on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other would make a university anywhere. Great as an original thinker and expounder, he was greater as a teacher; “he built himself into the mental fabric of two generations of men.”
Laurens P. Hickok.—Laurens P. Hickok (1798–1888), a Congregational clergyman, and professor successively in Western Reserve College, Auburn Theological Seminary, and Union College (of which he was virtually president 1860–1868), wrote a number of philosophical and theological works, among which are “Rational Psychology” (1848), “Moral Science” (1853), “Mental Science” (1854), “Rational Cosmology” (1858), “Humanity Immortal” (1872), “Creator and Creation” (1872), and “The Logic of Reason” (1875). He also contributed to theological and philosophical reviews.
Francis Bowen.—A conservative resolutely opposed to the teachings of Fichte, Kant, and Mill on the one hand and of Darwin on the other, Francis Bowen (1811–1890) is remembered as a strong and clear writer and an enthusiastic teacher. Nine years after his graduation from Harvard (in 1833), we find him editing Virgil and publishing “Critical Essays on Speculative Philosophy.” He edited The North American Review from 1843 till 1854, then became Alford professor of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil polity in Harvard College. Of his voluminous writings we can mention only a few: “Lectures on the Application of Metaphysical and Ethical Science to the Evidences of Religion” (1849), “Lectures on Political Economy” (1850), “The Principles of Political Economy” (1856), an edition of “The Metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton” (1862), “Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann” (1877), and “A Layman’s Study of the English Bible” (1885).
Noah Porter.—Professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale College for forty-six years, and president of Yale University for fifteen years, Noah Porter (1811–1892) made a strong impression in both the philosophical, and the educational world. He was the son of the Rev. Noah Porter, for fifty years minister of the Congregational Church in Farmington, Connecticut, and graduated at Yale in 1831. He was a minister at New Milford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, for ten years; then he assumed his chair at Yale. His chief work, “The Human Intellect” (1868), ably champions the theistic view of the universe, and has had wide use as a text-book, as has also his “Elements of Intellectual Science” (1871). He wrote also “The Elements of Moral Science” (1885) and “A Critical Exposition of Kant’s Ethics” (1886); besides several books on education, of which we may mention “American Colleges and the American Public” (1870) and “Books and Reading” (1870). He also edited the revised editions (1864, 1890) of Webster’s Dictionary.
James McCosh.—The Scottish philosophy was vigorously championed in America by President James McCosh (1811–1894). Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, of a sturdy middle-class family, he was educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh. His graduation essay on the Stoic philosophy won him the honorary degree of A.M. Becoming a minister of the Established Kirk, he seceded with Chalmers and rendered valuable service to the Free Church. His “Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral” (1850) laid the foundation of his fame as a philosophical writer, and doubtless led to his appointment in 1852 to the professorship of logic and metaphysics in Queen’s College, Belfast. From Belfast, after an active literary and educational career, he was called to the presidency of Princeton College, and thenceforward was a distinguished figure in the American intellectual world. His numerous writings after 1868 include “The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical” (1874), “The Emotions” (1880), “Philosophical Series” (1882–1885, eight volumes), “Psychology of the Cognitive Powers” (1886), “Realistic Philosophy Defended” (1887), “The Religious Aspect of Evolution” (1887), and “First and Fundamental Truths” (1894). Dr. McCosh was one of the first to point out the theological bearing of Darwinism and to announce his acceptance of it when properly understood. “Touching the thought of his time,” says Professor Sloane, “at its salient points and with tremendous vitality, he constantly insisted on the few central truths of his system in their application to each new question as it arose. Incisive, intense, and real, or rather concrete in his thinking, he felt a loyalty to truth which he sought to instil with all his might into the minds of others.”
William Torrey Harris.—William T. Harris (born in 1835) left Yale in 1857 to become a teacher in St. Louis, where he was superintendent of schools from 1867 till 1888. From 1889 till 1906 he was United States Commissioner of Education. Although leading a busy life as a teacher, he found time for philosophical work. He founded (1867) and has since edited The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first philosophical periodical in English. His “Hegel’s Logic” (1890), while highly technical, is one of the clearest and most scholarly expositions of Hegelian thought. He has written also “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy” (1889), “Psychologic Foundations of Education” (1898), and many smaller educational and philosophical studies.