John Fiske.—One of the greatest of modern expositors of science was John Fiske (1842–1901). He was born at Middletown, Connecticut, and entered Harvard as a sophomore in 1860, graduating in 1863. The works of Spencer and Darwin opened a new world to his vigorous imagination and he devoted many years to elucidating and applying their doctrines, in “Myths and Myth Makers” (1872), “Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy” (1874), “The Unseen World” (1876), “Darwinism, and Other Essays” (1879), “Excursions of an Evolutionist” (1883), “The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin” (1884), and “The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge” (1885). His later years were devoted to studies in American history, the events of which he interpreted as the result of evolutionary processes. His work reveals a uniform optimism.
Some Living Writers.—Among living writers on philosophical themes space will permit the mention of only two or three. The son of Henry James, the theologian, and the brother of Henry James, Jr., the novelist, William James (born in 1842) was educated privately and at Harvard, from which he received the degree of M.D. in 1870. Two years later he became an instructor and in 1881 a full professor, the subjects of his later interest being psychology and philosophy. He has written, among a large number of books and articles, “Principles of Psychology” (1890), “The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy” (1897), “Human Immortality” (the Ingersoll Lecture, 1898), “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University, 1902), and “Pragmatism” (1907). Especially noteworthy is his work in analytical psychology. Always clear and fresh in style, his writings have exerted a marked influence on thought both in Europe and in America.
Borden Parker Bowne (born in 1847), who, after graduating at New York University in 1871, studied at Halle, Göttingen, and Paris, in 1876 became professor of philosophy at Boston University. He has written “The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer” (1874), “Studies in Theism” (1879), “Metaphysics” (1882), “Introduction to Psychological Theory” (1886), and “Principles of Ethics” (1892).
Jacob Gould Schurman (born in 1854) has made some worthy contributions to the literature of ethics; it is a matter of regret that administrative work has of late kept him from writing more for the general public. He was born at Freetown, Prince Edward Island, and studied at Acadia College. In 1875 he won the Gilchrist Dominion Scholarship in the University of London, from which he graduated in 1877. He later studied at Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen, and in Italy. From 1886 till 1892 he was professor of philosophy in Cornell University, of which he became president in 1892. He has written lucid studies of “Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution” (1881), “The Ethical Import of Darwinism” (1888), “Belief in God” (1890), and “Agnosticism and Religion” (1896).
Josiah Royce (born in 1855), a Californian who studied at the University of California, Leipsic, Göttingen, and Johns Hopkins, has done much to interpret and popularise the thought of Hegel, and has made valuable original contributions to contemporary idealistic thought. His philosophical works include “The Religious Aspect of Philosophy” (1885), “The Spirit of Modern Philosophy” (1892), “The Conception of God” (1895), “Studies of Good and Evil” (1898), “The Conception of Immortality” (1900, an Ingersoll Lecture), and “The World and the Individual” (1900–1901). A close thinker, he writes in a remarkably fresh, vigorous, and informal style.
Political and Legal Science.—In the fields of political, economic, social, and legal science the most that can be claimed for American writers is that a fair number of them have achieved genuine distinction and enjoy international reputations. America is still too young to be expected to have produced independent schools of thought in these lines. What Dr. Sherwood says of the economists may have a larger application here:
The chief reason for our failure to make large contributions to economic science [he remarks in his “Tendencies in American Economic Thought”] is the same reason which explains the meagreness of our contribution to general science, viz., the all-absorbing problem of making use of the advantages within our grasp. Within a century we have been compelled to work out several most difficult problems: how to unite in a solid empire many vigorous, large, and discordant nationalities; how to stretch this empire over the adjacent territories, so as to remove dangerous enemies; how to get rid of slavery without disrupting the Union; how to make our general education keep pace with our growth in numbers and with the advance of science; how, with the rapidly shifting forms of industrial organisation, to maintain purity of government and social order; how to govern an empire without an emperor; how to push forward material civilisation without going backwards in intellectual and moral civilisation; how to stimulate invention so as to win wealth for all, with inadequate labour and capital.
These practical problems have kept us from producing men with wealth and leisure for working out solutions of the large abstract questions raised in these sciences. Nor have our writers yet succeeded in handling large masses of facts with the skill of some foreign writers. The best comprehensive work on American institutions remains Bryce’s “American Commonwealth,” the work of an Englishman. Yet in Marshall, Kent, and Story we have produced some great jurists; in Wheaton, Lawrence, and Woolsey some great writers on legal science; in Carey, Wells, Walker, and George writers of commanding importance in the sphere of political economy.
John Marshall.—Pre-eminent among the jurists of America is John Marshall (1755–1835), for thirty-four years Chief-Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall served as an officer in the Revolution; in 1780, being without a command, he attended Chancellor Wyeth’s lectures on law at William and Mary College. Entering upon the practice of law, he quickly became known for his acumen. His accession to the Supreme Court bench (1801) marks an epoch in our legal and constitutional history. He had, as it were, to blaze a trail. The Constitution had been adopted; it had yet to be construed. A thousand questions arose as to what it meant, what it included, what it was meant not to include. Marshall’s decisions, recorded in thirty-two volumes of reports, reveal the impartial workings of a master legal mind. Such men do not often appear; it was fortunate that the American Government in its early years was guided by Marshall’s constitutional constructions. They virtually form a system of law, a system which has not since been seriously modified. “The judge who rears such a monument to his memory,” says Mr. Magruder, his biographer, “will never be forgotten; in the united domain of English and American jurisprudence there are not half a dozen such memorials; but not the least distinguished is that of Marshall.”
James Kent.—It has been said of Kent’s “Commentaries upon American Law” (1826–1830) that they had a deeper and more lasting influence upon the American character than any other secular book of the nineteenth century. James Kent (1763–1847) graduated from Yale in 1781 and then practised law, first at Poughkeepsie, and after 1793 in New York City. In the same year he became professor of law in Columbia College. The Federalist leaders rapidly advanced him; he was made Chief-Justice of the New York Supreme Court in 1804 and Chancellor in 1814. Retiring in 1823, he resumed his teaching at Columbia, and later published many of his lectures in the “Commentaries.” His Chancery decisions, to be found in Caines’ and Johnson’s reports, were of fundamental importance and form the basis of American equity jurisprudence.