It has not been more than a couple of years since a leading American author, whose work has often ornamented the pages of the Unpopular Review, said: “I hate the very name of Evolution.” This was because Spencer traced the law no farther than it could be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion, and our friend was a profound student of the Greek and Oriental imaginings which try to transcend all that can be expressed in those terms.
And yet a few years before, the same scholar was one of the earliest students in this country of M. Bergson—the Bergson to whom a friend lately said: “People run after you because you have covered the colossal forbidding structure raised by Darwin and Spencer, with flowers.” “No,” said Bergson, “I have shown that the flowers necessarily grow out of it.”
The paradoxical student of Bergson, who did not see these flowers, has since grown to a better realization of them, and of the Law of Evolution. He lately said that he was tracing the course of thought from Plato to Christ, and when his companion remarked: “Oh! You’re writing on the evolution of the Christian religion,” he admitted the soft impeachment. But what Bergson did not do for him, has been partly done, though indirectly, as the same thing has been done for the world more than by any other man, by Fiske.
President Butler once said that Philosophy begins where Spencer left off. But he did not say, and could not justly say, that it begins beyond regions whither Spencer pointed the way. In fact he was not just in saying that Spencer’s generalizations, in the regions to which he confined them, were not Philosophy, or that there was any real break between those regions and the regions beyond, where they were carried by Fiske, or even the regions still farther beyond where, whatever may be the outcome, they are now being carried by students given to legitimate Psychical Research. Spencer was too early for the movement into the latter, and as to his relations with the former, Fiske well says (Evolution and Religion, p. 277):
“There are some people who seem to think that it is not enough that Mr. Spencer should have made all these priceless contributions to human knowledge, but actually complain of him for not giving us a complete and exhaustive system of theology into the bargain.”
Yet Spencer, though he restrained himself from transcendental speculations regarding Evolution, was by no means insensible to them when made by others. Some readers not altogether unfamiliar with Emerson will be surprised at the collection made by Fiske’s biographer, of Emerson’s inspirations regarding Evolution, especially as they were given on an almost negligible knowledge of the scientific development of the law. Spencer appreciated them so highly that among his few American pilgrimages was one to Concord, and this despite Spencer’s distrust of intuition, and Emerson’s faith in it.
By some even modern thinkers Intuition is boldly claimed to be an instrument of research; by others its very existence, outside of morbid imagination, is denied, and the only legitimate instrument of research is declared to be observation verified by experiment that can be repeated at will. The truth, as usual in controversy, includes both statements, and is covered by neither. Creatures with rudimentary eyes and ears must have “intuitions” of colors and sounds beyond their capacity of clear apprehension; and even our eyes, which must be rudimentary compared with possible eyes, have in regard to even our spectrum, intuitions, some of which have recently been made clearer by the photograph and the X-ray. These cleared-up intuitions are now added to positive knowledge. Intuition is here proved an instrument of research, and it is one in every discovery. But until verified by experiment, it is not a reliable instrument of research: for what seems to be intuition is often mistaken, and is generally so vague as to be subject of conflicting opinions, and hence of conflicting action. Moreover, as the subjects of intuition are beyond our knowledge, intuitions are often held to be superior to knowledge, and worthy of greater enthusiasm. Consequently conflicting opinions regarding intuitions have probably led to more tragedies than any other blunder. There is no intuition more nearly universal than that of the immortality of the soul. But even so devout a man as Fiske pronounced it unverifiable, and it is so uncertain that all sorts of conflicting dogmas have grown up around it, until it has led not only to the self-immolations of India and the human sacrifices of Mexico, but to the Arena of Nero, the inquisition of Torquemada, the Thirty Years’ War, and even within the memory of living men, the agonizing rupture of many a family.
Fiske did more, through deductions from the law of Evolution, toward putting this most important of intuitions upon the basis of established knowledge, than any man had done before him. He did this not only in his writings on The Idea of God, Through Nature to God, and The Destiny of Man, but in the whole tendency of his work, not only when expounding the Law of Evolution as Philosophy, but in tracing it through History. In this particular he was in advance of his great compeers in his own department: for he did not hesitate, as Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley did, to deal with the intuitions of his time. Such intuitions as are true being necessarily in advance of knowledge, there is danger of assuming to be true some that are not. This danger kept Huxley almost entirely away from them, and Spencer farther away than any other great philosopher. It was this abstention, certainly excusable and probably justifiable in one who prefers it, that makes his philosophy hated, and prevents its being even studied, not to say understood, by those who love the quagmires and mirages built up by mistaken intuition.
That essential instrument of research—invaluable, despite all its dangers—Fiske estimated more broadly and justly than, perhaps, any other philosopher, certainly than his great master. This makes it singularly pathetic that his premature death should have cut him off from the investigations which have seemed to many leading minds to point to a verification—even to have reached a verification, of the greatest as well as the widest intuition of the ages. If he has risen to a bird’s-eye view, or more probably a teloptic consciousness, of what is going on here, it must amuse and cheer him to see that the psychical researchers are not persecuted as the evolutionists were—as he himself was in his youth, but are at worst merely laughed at as a set of inoffensive idiots. Balfour, Crookes, Lodge, and Barrett are among them, and James, Hodgson, Myers, and Sidgwick are passed from among them; and we believe that Fiske and even Spencer, had their lot been cast in these days, would be among the most interested of them.