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.