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.
Fiske was never absorbingly interested in the specific problems of the elevation of the less fortunate portion of mankind, but the wider philosophic and historic problems to which he was devoted include those specific ones. The widest of all, of course, is Evolution, and probably he did more to diffuse a knowledge of that than any man of his time except its two greatest discoverers. Had he lived to apply, as he proposed, the all-comprehending law to the history of our nation from the time it became one at Washington’s inauguration, his help in the perplexities which now, next to the war, most beset us, would have been invaluable. But what he did live to accomplish is of a value that probably none of us can realize, and not many even suspect.
The fundamental policy indicated by the law of Evolution is: Build on what you have. Next to the family, the one institution on which civilization rests is the right of private property—the opportunity of every man to obtain and hold it. The growth of this right made the advance from slavery and feudalism. Owing to the great difference in men’s capacities, its present most marked attainment is capitalism, but with the gradual development of men’s capacities, especially as promoted by the spread of education, capitalism seems destined to evolve into coöperation, of which the germs are already manifest in the savings-banks and stock companies, especially the avowedly coöperative companies whose special development has been in England. The only legitimate and permanent source of private property is production. The robbery of Russian landholders or American manufacturers to confer the semblance of property rights on the incapable, is not evolution, and can have no permanent results. In all such proceedings, the property has soon disappeared, or found its way back to the capable. Such processes are catastrophic: the only successful ones have been evolutionary. The general realization of this would probably do more to settle the irrepressible conflict between the haves and the have-nots than any other purely intellectual agency now within sight. While the word Evolution is on everybody’s tongue, men whose thinking is saturated through and through by a realization of the law, do not abound. If they did, there would not be so many Bolsheviks, and Russia would still be in her place with the allies.
One of the most important causes of the war which Germany is waging against civilization, is her imperfect grasp of the philosophy of Evolution, and one reason for her imperfect grasp is the scarcity of men like Fiske. The doctrine that the fittest should and must survive is sound. Germany’s doctrine that she is the fittest, is not: for it makes the tests of fitness brute force, cunning and unscrupulousness, and ignores the fact that the course of Evolution has brought into the world such forces as love of justice, sympathy, the coöperative spirit, and altruism. Whether these qualities are yet so far evolved as to be the fittest to survive, is being tested by the conflict now going on. If Germany proves herself fittest to survive, it will be proved only that although the other qualities control in many advanced places, the time for the world’s control by them is not yet come. If the Allies conquer, it will be proved that that time is already here.
In a rough way it may be said that Spencer, in restricting himself to demonstrating so much of evolution as could be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion, left open too much opportunity for the German conception that evolution stops at the point where those terms stop; and it can be said, with equally rough justice, that the philosopher who, up to this time, has traced the law farthest beyond that point, was Fiske.
Spencer said in a letter to Fiske, February 2, 1870 (Life, I, 368. The italics are apparently the biographer’s. We condense a little.):
“The deanthropomorphization of men’s conceptions has never occupied any conspicuous or distinctive place in my own mind—they have been all along quite secondary to the grand doctrine of Evolution from a physical point of view. As I originally conceived it, ‘First Principles’ was what now forms its second part. I subsequently saw the need for Part I (The Unknowable) simply for the purpose of guarding myself against the charges of atheism and materialism. I consider it [‘The Synthetic Philosophy’] as essentially a Cosmogony that admits of being worked out in physical terms, without necessarily entering upon any metaphysical questions, and without committing myself to any particular form of philosophy commonly so called. My sole original purpose was the interpretation of all concrete phenomena in terms of Matter and Motion, and I regard all other purposes as incidental and secondary.”