LIBRARY 1 
 
 UNIVE SITY OF 
 CALfO :;nia 
 
 SAN DiEGO 
 
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 fi— iin2
 
 
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 SOME INFLUENCES IN MODERN 
 PHILOSOPHIC THOUGHT
 
 Some Influences in Modern 
 Philosophic Thought/ 
 
 Being the fifth series of Johk Calvin McNair 
 
 Lectures before the University of North 
 
 Carolina, delivered at Chapel Hill, 
 
 April 19, 20 and 21, 1912 
 
 By r^ 
 
 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 
 
 President of Yale University 
 
 NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: HENRY FROWDE 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 MCMXIII
 
 Copyright, 1913 
 
 BY 
 
 Yale University Press 
 
 First printed May, 1913, 1000 copies
 
 PREFACE 
 
 By the will of the late John Calvin 
 McNair a course of lectures was estab- 
 lished at the University of North Caro- 
 lina whose object should be to show the 
 mutual bearing of science and theology 
 upon each other. It was my privilege 
 to serve as McNair Lecturer in the year 
 1912, 
 
 I have published the lectures substan- 
 tially as they were delivered; but I have 
 divided what was originally the first lec- 
 ture into two separate chapters. I have 
 taken the liberty of adding, as an Appen- 
 dix, a brief discussion of the meaning of 
 the term Philosophy, which has not been 
 hitherto published, and an estimate of the 
 influence of Darwin upon historical and 
 political thought, reprinted from the Psy- 
 chological Review for May, 1909.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 No one can expect to find an exhaustive 
 treatment of so large a topic in so small a 
 space; but I venture to hope that some 
 may be helped in their reading and in their 
 thinking by the suggestions which the book 
 contains. 
 
 I am glad to take this opportunity to 
 express my great indebtedness to the fac- 
 ulty and students of the University of 
 North Carolina for the courtesy which I 
 enjoyed during my stay at Chapel Hill. 
 
 A. T. H. 
 
 Yale University, 
 December, 19 12. 
 
 VI
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. General Purpose of the Course . . 1 
 
 II. Changed Conceptions of Science . 12 
 
 III. New Views of Politics and of Ethics 40 
 
 IV. The Spiritual Basis of Recent Poetry 77 
 Appendix I. On the Meaning of the 
 
 term Philosophy . , .113 
 
 Appendix II. The Influence of Charles 
 Darwin on Historical and Political 
 Science . . . . .121 
 
 Vll
 
 GENERAL PURPOSE OF THE COURSE 
 
 A SEARCHING test of what educa- 
 -^ ^- tion has done for a man is given by 
 the question: "Has he gained a sense of 
 the real and permanent values of the differ- 
 ent parts of life, as distinct from their 
 apparent magnitude at the moment?" 
 
 This sense is not common, nor easily 
 acquired. Most men judge the size of 
 things by their nearness or remoteness. 
 A single maple tree in the foreground 
 blots out a hundred miles of distant land- 
 scape from their minds as well as their 
 eyes. The man who is occupied with the 
 pursuit of money or political office or 
 scientific research tends to think everything 
 small which does not visibly contribute to 
 
 money-getting, or political influence, or 
 
 1
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 scientific discovery. There is much in the 
 current teaching of the day which tends 
 to increase this danger. We are prone to 
 disparage philosophic methods of study as 
 compared with practical ones; to urge the 
 student to develop his special interests and 
 capacities rather than to widen his intel- 
 lectual horizon; to count the man as best 
 educated who can best do his own small 
 fraction of the world's work. 
 
 With this view I have little sympathy. 
 He who Is content to be a specialist and 
 nothing more, however long and well he 
 may have been trained, cannot properly 
 be said to have been educated. This term 
 is by rights reserved for him who has 
 acquired a broad outlook on life as a 
 whole; who has worked out ideas of his 
 own as to the relation between our own 
 selves, the visible universe about us, and 
 the Invisible principle that rules it. Ideas 
 of his own, I say. A man cannot take his 
 
 2
 
 GENERAL PURPOSE 
 
 philosophy at second hand, as a set of 
 ready-made principles based on the study 
 and experience of others. If he tries to do 
 this he gets a creed, not a philosophy. 
 "What you have inherited from your 
 fathers," says Goethe, "you must earn for 
 yourself before you can call it yours." 
 
 You will find plenty of people inside the 
 churches and outside of them who are 
 anxious to impose their philosophy upon 
 you and your fellow men in the form of a 
 creed. But the tendency of all such creeds 
 is to become mere formulas. No creed or 
 philosophy when thus imposed from out- 
 side is of much use to a growing man or a 
 growing society in solving the problems 
 which each change of circumstances neces- 
 sarily brings. In order to be able to do 
 this men must have brought the proposi- 
 tions of their creed into vital connection 
 with their own experience of life. 
 
 There are two things that a man must 
 
 3
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 WOO and win for himself: his bride and his 
 philosophy. Mr. Huxley is said to have 
 expressed the wish that he had some friend 
 whose judgment he could trust to whom he 
 could delegate the work of examining the 
 claims of the Christian church upon a 
 man's allegiance. He was anxious to know 
 what should be his attitude toward that 
 institution, and he was too busy with his 
 work as a biologist to find the time for 
 examination of the evidence. It will be 
 remembered that Captain Miles Standish 
 for somewhat similar reasons actually dele- 
 gated to his friend John Alden the work 
 of getting him a bride, he being too busy 
 with the defense of the colony to have time 
 for anything else. As matters fell out, 
 however. Miles Standish was compelled to 
 leave his bride to John Alden; and I 
 suspect that if Huxley had really tried 
 his experiment he would have ended by 
 leaving his religion to his friend.
 
 GENERAL PURPOSE 
 
 Some people acquire their philosophic 
 views by actual contact with life itself; by 
 meeting men of various types and tem- 
 peraments and thus learning to look at the 
 world's problems from different angles of 
 vision. Others get the same result from 
 books; they study the classics of literature 
 and history and science, and find which 
 things have proved large at all times 
 instead of simply looking large for the 
 moment. The college student has an 
 opportunity of combining both these meth- 
 ods; and I count it one of the greatest 
 privileges of college life to use this oppor- 
 tunity. In after years the man who goes 
 into active business Is cut off from contact 
 with the past; the man who does not go 
 into active business is cut off from contact 
 with the present. To the college student 
 more than to any one else it is given to 
 feel the inspiration of old ideas and tradi- 
 tions and at the same time to discuss them 
 
 5
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 with the men of today and by the methods 
 of today. This affords him the oppor- 
 tunity for philosophic thought in the best 
 and truest sense. 
 
 I shall not undertake in the brief com- 
 pass of three lectures to furnish you with 
 a ready-made philosophical system. If I 
 did, and if I succeeded in condensing into 
 three hours what might well fill three hun- 
 dred, the resulting theories would be mine 
 and not yours. All that I can do is to 
 indicate some of the lines of thought in 
 science, in politics, and in literature, which 
 have met the needs of thinking men of 
 successive generations in the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 Lines of thought, I say, in the plural, 
 rather than line of thought, in the singular, 
 because the nineteenth century has wit- 
 nessed the development of a whole series 
 of different philosophies — the positive 
 philosophy of our grandfathers, the evo- 
 
 6
 
 GENERAL PURPOSE 
 
 lutionary philosophy of our fathers, and 
 the so-called "pragmatist" philosophy 
 which now appears to have displaced them 
 both. We cannot speak of a nineteenth 
 century fashion in thinking in the same 
 way in which we speak of an eighteenth 
 century fashion or a thirteenth century 
 fashion. Fashions in thinking have 
 changed nearly as fast as fashions in 
 dress. System has succeeded system with 
 bewildering frequency. The idol of today 
 is the antiquarian curiosity of tomorrow. 
 In my own student years and in those that 
 immediately followed, philosophic interest 
 centered about Herbert Spencer. Some- 
 times we agreed with him, sometimes we 
 disagreed with him ; but whether we agreed 
 or disagreed, we were always intensely 
 interested in what he said. His way of 
 looking at the universe appealed to us, 
 whether his specific theories did so or not. 
 
 We were quite ready to admit that future 
 
 7
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT , 
 
 generations might modify his doctrines or 
 might reject part of what he said; that 
 future generations. should cease to be inter- 
 ested in his philosophy and should say, "It 
 may be true or it may not be true, but it 
 is a rather uninteresting and useless kind 
 of thing either way," never entered our 
 minds. Yet this is precisely what has hap- 
 pened. The mode of thought which he 
 represented has come and gone. Thirty 
 years ago it was rather old-fashioned not 
 to care for Herbert Spencer; today it is 
 rather old-fashioned to care for him. 
 
 I shall not try to expound Herbert 
 Spencer's philosophy or any of the other 
 philosophies of the nineteenth century in 
 detail. If you want to know what Spencer 
 said you must read Spencer. If you want 
 to know what Nietzsche said you must 
 read Nietzsche. If you want to know 
 what James said you must read James. 
 Nor am I undertaking to decide which of 
 
 8
 
 GENERAL PURPOSE 
 
 these philosophies is good and which is 
 
 bad. Each philosophy was good so far 
 
 as it met the needs of its own time. Each 
 
 philosophy was bad so far as it failed to 
 
 satisfy the wants of the next generation. 
 
 What I wish to do is to go one step farther 
 
 back — to show the concrete causes which 
 
 led different groups of students and men of 
 
 affairs to be interested in these successive 
 
 philosophies one after another. 
 
 The wise historian does not generally 
 
 attempt to decide which of his characters 
 
 is noblest or which of their constitutional 
 
 theories is the best. Plutarch tried this 
 
 sort of thing now and then; but even in 
 
 the case of Plutarch you will find that 
 
 most of his comparisons of good men end 
 
 by saying that each was good in his own 
 
 way, and most of his comparisons of bad 
 
 men end by saying that each was bad in 
 
 his own way. "Tiberius had more virtues, 
 
 but Agis had fewer faults" ; so the com- 
 
 9
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 ment runs, through the whole Hst. The 
 real work of the historian is not so much 
 to pass judgment on his characters as to 
 explain the relation between these charac- 
 ters, good or bad, and the state of society 
 which brought them to the front. He 
 makes his chronicle of facts in one decade 
 an explanation of the men of the next. I 
 am going to try to do a little of the same 
 sort of work for the history of nineteenth 
 century philosophy. I shall try to tell as 
 well as I can in so short a space some of 
 the things that happened in the world of 
 science and the world of politics which 
 made people crave a different sort of 
 explanation of the universe at the end of 
 the century from that which satisfied most 
 of them at the beginning. I hope by so 
 doing to help some of you to understand 
 more fully than you have done the real 
 significance of these events, and to assist 
 
 you in some slight degree in working out 
 
 10
 
 GENERAL PURPOSE 
 
 your own philosophy of life by setting 
 forth some facts which have influenced the 
 beliefs of thinking men of recent genera- 
 tions. In the words of one of the wisest 
 Frenchmen of his age, Charles Dunoyer, 
 "/^ n'impose rien, je ne propose meme 
 rien: j' expose." 
 
 11
 
 II 
 
 CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF 
 SCIENCE 
 
 'TpHE period from 1815 to 1848 lies 
 -*- intellectually very far removed from 
 the present. The science and the litera- 
 ture, the politics and the ethics of our 
 grandfathers were radically different from 
 our own. We see the extent of the change 
 when we contrast the poetry of Byron with 
 that of Kipling, the music of Mendelssohn 
 with that of Wagner, the essays of Sydney 
 Smith with those of Chesterton, or the 
 political philosophy of Malthus with that 
 of Morley. The age that followed the 
 French Revolution was more remote from 
 the world of today than the age that pre- 
 ceded it. Macaulay — a most character- 
 istic product of his time — is farther away 
 
 12
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 from us than Edmund Burke or Adam 
 Smith, 
 
 If we try to find the common element 
 in these illustrations I have cited, in order 
 to construct for ourselves a picture of the 
 feelings and habits of the time, the first 
 thing we notice is a certain finality of state- 
 ment and utterance. Lord Melbourne, a 
 survival of an earlier period and the head 
 of a ministry of which Macaulay was a 
 brilliant member, once said with a sigh at 
 the close of a cabinet meeting, "I only wish 
 I were as sure of anything as young Tom 
 Macaulay is of everything." I had in my 
 hands a few months since a manuscript 
 notebook of the first course of lectures 
 on chemistry delivered by Professor Silli- 
 man at Yale College a century ago, after 
 his return from a period of study with the 
 great European masters. He said in sub- 
 stance: "Chemistry is to all intents and 
 purposes a finished science. Whatever 
 
 13
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 may be done in the future, it is impossible 
 that all ages to come, all put together, 
 should ever make discoveries equal in 
 number and importance to the things which 
 have been found out in the last thirty or 
 forty years." There is a similar utter- 
 ance in Mill's Political Economy — all 
 the more significant because Mill him- 
 self was one of the most modest of men 
 in estimating his personal merits and 
 achievements : 
 
 "Happily, there is nothing in the laws 
 of Value which remains for the present or 
 any future writer to clear up; the theory 
 of the subject is complete : the only diffi- 
 culty to be overcome is that of so stating 
 it as to solve by anticipation the chief 
 perplexities which occur in applying it: 
 and to do this, some minuteness of expo- 
 sition, and considerable demands on the 
 patience of the reader, are unavoidable." 
 
 This spirit of finality carried with it a 
 
 14
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 good deal of intolerance. It is doubtful 
 whether there was as much real liberty of 
 thought in Europe in the first half of the 
 nineteenth century as in the last half of 
 the eighteenth. Physically, indeed, men 
 were freer. There was less restriction of 
 movement, less effort to circumscribe the 
 emotions and dictate the actions of the 
 people. But mentally, I suspect that men 
 were less free — at any rate in the great 
 centers of thought. It was harder rather 
 than easier to do your thinking for your- 
 self or to defy any of the manifold dic- 
 tates of fashion. The eighteenth century 
 had encouraged individuality of mind and 
 of speech. It was fertile in novelties of 
 every kind. The first half of the nine- 
 teenth century discouraged such individ- 
 uality, whenever it seemed to threaten 
 established social usages and conventions. 
 The larger the man was, the more chance 
 
 he had of achieving freedom in the eigh- 
 
 15
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 teenth century; the larger the man was, the 
 less chance he seemed to have of achieving 
 freedom in the first half of the nineteenth. 
 This was the age which killed Keats and 
 ostracized Shelley; which shut up writers 
 like Silvio Pellico in prison and drove 
 philosophic thinkers like Marx into 
 avowed antagonism to the social order. 
 
 A system of metaphysics which pre- 
 vailed in England during that period illus- 
 trates the characteristics of the times. It 
 is called the "common sense" philosophy. 
 You are no longer to be compelled to 
 believe what Aristotle tells you because 
 Aristotle said it. You are no longer to be 
 compelled to believe what the church tells 
 you because the church says it. You are 
 to believe what common sense tells you as 
 we see it — "we" representing the respect- 
 able body of thinking men in the nine- 
 teenth century. You are at perfect liberty 
 to believe otherwise; but if you do "we" 
 
 16
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 shall perceive that you have no sense, and 
 ' we shall treat you accordingly. 
 
 All this was natural enough. In the 
 light of the political events which had 
 immediately preceded, it was not only 
 natural but inevitable. The ferment of 
 eighteenth century thought, which had 
 produced a Rousseau and a Voltaire, a 
 Franklin and a Jefferson, a Goethe and a 
 Napoleon, had also produced a revolution 
 which had shaken the social order to its 
 foundation and involved Europe in a series 
 of wars unparalleled in their extent and 
 severity. The world required rest. The 
 need of progress was less conspicuous than 
 the need of order. The need of free 
 thought was less exigent than the need of 
 coherent thought. The statesmen of 
 Europe were trying to fit the broken pieces 
 of European politics back into a monarchi- 
 cal scheme. The literary men of Europe 
 were trying to substitute skilled treatment 
 
 17
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 of safe themes for erratic treatment of 
 unsafe ones. The period from 1815 to 
 1848 was, I think, an age of happiness and 
 contentment for the majority of civilized 
 people, because the majority of people 
 were pretty well satisfied with the amount 
 of liberty they themselves enjoyed, and did 
 not mind very much if this or that man 
 were denied a freedom for which they 
 themselves felt no immediate craving. 
 But it was not an age of progress, nor an 
 age of liberty for progressively minded 
 men. 
 
 From this state of intellectual compla- 
 cency the world was gradually aroused 
 by two somewhat independent sets of 
 events — one in science, which will be 
 described in this lecture, another in politics, 
 which forms the theme of the next. 
 
 The science of the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century had been of an eminently 
 
 18
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 safe character. It was at once correct and 
 commonplace. People had abandoned the 
 wilder ideas and hopes which had animated 
 the investigators of earlier centuries. They 
 no longer dabbled in the arts of magic 
 or of prophecy. They no longer sought 
 to transmute lead into gold, or to find 
 the mysterious "elixir of life." Alchemy 
 had given place to chemistry, astrology 
 to astronomy. Investigators were not 
 so much occupied with discovering prin- 
 ciples as with ordering and arranging 
 facts. The chemist had his list of ele- 
 ments, with the atomic weights which 
 determined the proportions in which they 
 combined; he had ceased to speculate on 
 the nature of these atoms or to investigate 
 with the interest that had animated his 
 predecessors the strange processes which 
 went on when different elements united. 
 The physicist was content to describe and 
 measure the phenomena of heat and sound 
 
 19
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 and light and electricity; concerning the 
 essential causes of these phenomena he 
 was content to accept what Newton or 
 Huyghens or Franklin had suggested. A 
 single accident on the part of Benjamin 
 Franklin in the choice of material for one 
 of his electrical experiments was sufficient 
 to give wrong shape to the whole form of 
 electric theory for a century afterward. 
 The geologist was more occupied with the 
 description of his rocks and with the order 
 in which they were probably deposited 
 than with any investigation into the meth- 
 ods by which they had been produced. 
 The botanist was satisfied to describe the 
 plants that he saw and group them into 
 classes according to their obvious resem- 
 blances. If, like Linnaeus, he contented 
 himself with arranging them according to 
 superficial or accidental resemblances, the 
 classification was called an artificial one. 
 If, like DeCandolle, he tried to get at 
 
 20
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 deeper and more essential characteristics 
 as a basis of his system, the classification 
 was said to be a natural one. But the 
 object was the same in the two cases. You 
 wanted to get your plant ticketed, so that 
 the boy who counted its stamens or the 
 man who dissected its pistils could know 
 where to find it in the last edition of the 
 encyclopEedia if it was a well-known spe- 
 cies, or where to put it in the next edition 
 if it was a newly discovered one. The 
 zoologist had no profounder aim than the 
 botanist. Even the human body was 
 studied in the same purely descriptive 
 spirit. Our knowledge was anatomical 
 rather than physiological or pathological. 
 Medical students were taught to describe 
 its parts with accuracy; they were not 
 taught with any corresponding degree of 
 success to explain their development and 
 their functions. The scientific instinct of 
 
 that day was an impulse to name things 
 
 21
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 and to identify them, rather than a craving 
 to lay bare the hidden forces by which they 
 were moved. We find this whole scheme 
 of classification systematized and glorified 
 in the positive philosophy of Auguste 
 Comte, where the different branches of 
 knowledge are themselves arranged in 
 order and each science brought into what 
 that philosopher believed to be a proper 
 relation to other sciences as part of an 
 articulated whole. 
 
 The middle of the nineteenth century 
 witnessed the development of three great 
 discoveries which aroused the world from 
 this intellectual complacency, changed the 
 character of modern science, and embold- 
 ened people to try to explain things which 
 they had previously been content to de- 
 scribe and arrange. These were the law 
 of the conservation of energy, the theory 
 of cellular tissue, and the process of 
 elimination by natural selection. 
 
 22
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 The doctrine of the conservation of 
 energy was the first of the three to be fully 
 developed. 
 
 The physicists of a hundred years 
 ago — or natural philosophers, as they 
 would then have called themselves — de- 
 scribed the behavior of a number of phe- 
 nomena like heat and sound and light, 
 which they treated as independent things. 
 The chemists of the same period described 
 and classified separate elements, and ridi- 
 culed the efforts of the earlier alchemists 
 to find some force which might possibly 
 transmute one element into another. There 
 had been, indeed, a few brilliant thinkers, 
 like our own fellow countryman. Count 
 Rumford, who had suggested that these 
 different things might not be so wholly 
 independent as they seemed. But such 
 men were isolated, and their voices were 
 unheard or forgotten. 
 
 About 1840 two physicians, studying 
 
 23
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 separately, one in Hamburg and another 
 in Manchester, developed a theory that 
 heat was a form of manifestation of 
 motion; that mechanics and thermo- 
 dynamics, instead of being separate 
 sciences, were one and the same science; 
 that the combustion of the coal in the fur- 
 nace and the expansion of the steam in 
 the boiler represented simply the trans- 
 mutations of energy from one form into 
 another; and that each unit of heat had 
 its mechanical equivalent in terms of 
 motion. The researches of Dr. Mayer 
 and Dr. Joule were carried further by a 
 line of eminent observers and mathema- 
 ticians — Faraday, Tyndall, Helmholtz, 
 and a score of others whose names 
 are household words today. Sound and 
 light, as well as heat, were found to be 
 manifestations of this same transmutable 
 energy in another form. Electrical phe- 
 nomena were explained in the same 
 
 24
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 manner. The whole modern system of 
 electrical engineering has been based upon 
 mechanical laws, more complex indeed 
 than those of thermodynamics but appar- 
 ently not less sure. Even chemical action 
 and chemical combination have been 
 treated as being manifestations of energy 
 in still another form; energy which is 
 stored up at one time or under one set of 
 conditions, and becomes "potentially" 
 available to be set free In another. The 
 chemist is no longer content when he has 
 weighed his substances or measured the 
 volumes of his gases; but he strives with 
 ever increasing success to coordinate all 
 chemical phenomena under a few basic 
 laws. 
 
 A somewhat similar change was wrought 
 in biological science by the development of 
 the theory of cellular tissue. 
 
 It was not a wholly new idea that living 
 
 bodies were composed of a multitude of 
 
 25
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 small cells, each with an independent 
 activity of its own. Caspar Wolff in 
 Germany and Bichat in France had 
 enunciated doctrines of this kind in the 
 eighteenth century. But it was reserved 
 for the nineteenth century to show how the 
 study of the behavior of these cells could 
 explain the life history of the plants and 
 animals in which they were gathered 
 together. Schwann at Berlin, in the years 
 from 1834 to 1838, first emphasized the 
 possible importance of this method of 
 explanation. The views of Schwann had 
 to be modified in many essential respects; 
 but they formed a basis for the theory of 
 cellular tissue or protoplasm developed by 
 DuBois-Reymond and Huxley and Vir- 
 chow, which wrought a change in the whole 
 underlying conception and purpose of the 
 biological sciences similar to that which 
 the doctrine of conservation of energy had 
 wrought in the physical sciences. These 
 
 26
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 sciences ceased to be merely descriptive; 
 they became in a fuller sense explanatory. 
 They looked less at the outside of things 
 and more at the inside. Morphology gave 
 place to physiology. The museum counted 
 for less as an instrument of the scientist's 
 study, the laboratory for more. The biol- 
 ogist was no longer content to describe the 
 anatomy of plants and animals and men; 
 he wanted to know their life history. It 
 was not enough to classify them by their 
 external forms or to explain the functions 
 of the different parts; he must know how 
 they grow and become strong or why they 
 become weak and die. Our books of 
 botany and zoology have become some- 
 thing more than well-ordered indexes of 
 the different forms of plant and animal 
 life. They occupy themselves with the 
 processes of fertilization and nutrition and 
 differentiation of activity on the one hand, 
 
 or of disease and death on the other. 
 
 27
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 But these two discoveries, wide reaching 
 as they were, affected chiefly the thoughts 
 and processes of the professional student 
 of science. The third great discovery, of 
 the principle of natural selection, wrought 
 a similar transformation in the thoughts 
 of the world as a whole. 
 
 People sometimes speak of natural 
 selection and evolution as though they 
 were the same thing. This is not true. 
 The idea of evolution is old. The idea 
 of the establishment of types and species 
 by natural selection is surprisingly new. 
 The importance of the process of natural 
 selection was discovered and its methods 
 of operation were developed simulta- 
 neously and to a large extent independ- 
 ently by Charles Darwin and Alfred 
 Russell Wallace about the middle of 
 the nineteenth century. The botanist or 
 zoologist of a generation previous had 
 been content to describe the fern or the 
 
 28
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 rose, the oyster or the rabbit. The cell 
 theory enabled him to go one step farther, 
 and to explain the life history of each of 
 these types of organism. But it did not 
 help him to account for the types them- 
 selves; it did not show why there were 
 ferns and why there were roses, why there 
 were oysters and why there were rabbits. 
 Darwinism offered a solution of this 
 problem. Darwin taught that each type 
 or species was developed by a gradual 
 process of adaptation to its surroundings 
 through a long series of generations. He 
 explained the life history of the type as 
 well as the life history of the individual. 
 
 No two living creatures are exactly 
 alike. Both among plants and among 
 animals the offspring varies slightly from 
 the parent stock. Some of these variations 
 tend to preserve the life of the plant or 
 animal in its struggle for existence, others 
 tend to hinder it. The characteristics that 
 
 29
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 prove a hindrance In the struggle are 
 ehminated by the death of the individuals 
 that possess them. The characteristics 
 that prove a help in the struggle are pre- 
 served. It is immaterial whether the 
 advantageous trait which at first sprung 
 up by accident be communicated by inheri- 
 tance or whether it become universal by 
 the slower process of eliminating all the 
 individuals that do not possess it. The 
 result is the same in either case. 
 
 Such was Darwin's theory of natural 
 selection. In spite of the patience with 
 which it had been developed and the 
 brilliant reasoning with which it was 
 urged, many of Darwin's contemporaries 
 hesitated to accept it because it undertook 
 to explain so much which previous genera- 
 tions had been compelled to take for 
 granted. But the younger men received it 
 with enthusiasm; and each decade as it has 
 passed has confirmed the essential cor- 
 
 30
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 rectness of Darwin's conclusions. The 
 evidence furnished by the progress of 
 geological science was particularly strong. 
 The successive series of fossil-bearing 
 strata showed a development and differ- 
 entiation of the forms of animal and plant 
 life which indicated that different species 
 were not created all at once or by separate 
 acts of miraculous power, but by an orderly 
 process of elimination and survival. 
 
 The influence of Darwin in modifying 
 scientific conceptions did not stop with 
 animal and vegetable physiology. It soon 
 became evident that the principle of nat- 
 ural selection would explain more things 
 and more important things than the origin 
 of biological species. Human life, even 
 more than plant life or animal life, repre- 
 sents a constant series of variations. The 
 whole process of history as we see it going 
 on about us is a record of a struggle for 
 existence. Those who are adapted to 
 
 31
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 their surroundings maintain their place in 
 line; those who are ill adapted fall by the 
 wayside. It is by a process like this that 
 tribes and nations are welded together; it 
 is by a process like this that political insti- 
 tutions are built up. In a book like 
 Bagehot's Physics and Politics we see 
 traced out the application of Darwin's 
 theory and the explanation of the public 
 life of organized bodies of men. In fact, 
 the application of the Darwinian theory to 
 political history is clearer than its appli- 
 cation to natural history, and its successive 
 steps can be traced far more surely. 
 
 Nor does the application of the theory 
 stop short with politics. It explains the 
 origin and development of ethical concep- 
 tions as no other theory has ever yet been 
 able to explain them. The human struggle 
 for existence is not a struggle between 
 individuals. It is a struggle between 
 groups, in which the morals of the group 
 
 32
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 count for more than the physical charac- 
 teristics of the individual members. Look- 
 ing back over the record of human history 
 as far as we can trace It, we see that the 
 savage was gradually crowded out by the 
 civilized man because the civilized man had 
 developed discipline and sympathy and 
 toleration; because he had learned to sub- 
 stitute reverence for superstition and 
 true fortitude for mere animal courage; 
 because he had accustomed himself to keep 
 his temper and to put the law above per- 
 sonal interests, and to live in charity with 
 a larger and larger section of mankind. 
 The whole progress of civilization, so far 
 as it is worth recording, is the record of 
 the displacement of animal excellences by 
 human ones and of savage virtues by 
 civilized ones. This displacement follows 
 the lines laid down by Darwin in his 
 theories of animal and plant life; and it is 
 being understood and developed today as 
 
 33
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 it could not have been understood and 
 developed two generations ago. 
 
 It will perhaps seem strange to some of 
 you if I say that Darwinism has become 
 the basis of a new spiritual philosophy of 
 life. Yet this statement is profoundly 
 true; and Its truth becomes more obvious 
 the more we compare the old science and 
 the old scientific thinking with the new. 
 The positive philosophy of Comte, to 
 which I have already alluded, represented 
 a view of life and thought which was 
 widely current In the early half of the cen- 
 tury. Comte's philosophy was distinctly 
 anti-spiritual. He said that science In its 
 progress toward perfection went through 
 three stages: the theological stage, where 
 everything was explained by the action of 
 God; the metaphysical stage, where people 
 tried to explain things by theories; and the 
 truly scientific stage, where they were con- 
 tent to look at facts. Comte's Ideal of 
 
 34
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 perfect science was a beautifully ordered 
 index of the universe, where God was 
 entirely left out and where law meant little 
 more than classification. The Darwinian 
 theory has reintroduced ideas of law which 
 Comte would have characterized as meta- 
 physical, and has made room for ideas of 
 God which Comte would have contemned 
 as theological. The scientific man today 
 is concerned to find the purpose and reason 
 of things. He is concerned to bring the 
 individual facts, not only into their proper 
 place in a scheme of the universe, but into 
 their proper subordination to a series of 
 forces which he figures and conceives in 
 terms at which Comte would have shud- 
 dered. He is concerned to study the right 
 and wrong of things; and he believes, as 
 the very essence of his theory, that the 
 right is that which will prevail in the long 
 run. The philosophy of the Darwinian is 
 in its essence the philosophy of Gamaliel: 
 
 35
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 "If this counsel or this work be of men, it 
 will come to nought : but if it be of God, ye 
 cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found 
 even to fight against God." 
 
 To the man who, like the founder of 
 these lectures, finds in an ordered universe 
 an evidence of a wise creator and a reve- 
 lation of God's methods, the Darwinian 
 theory comes as a welcome contribution of 
 science to theistic philosophy. It was un- 
 fortunately not received in that spirit by 
 the world as a whole. Men who had been 
 brought up to think that God created the 
 world in one way, however irrational and 
 disorderly, believed that his worship was 
 threatened by any evidence that went to 
 show that it had been created in some other 
 way, however rational and orderly. In 
 this respect, the Darwinian theory has 
 simply suffered the fate which has at first 
 befallen every scientific discovery which 
 
 was stated in terms that the public could 
 
 36
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 understand. When Copernicus and Gali- 
 leo developed the theory that the earth 
 and all the other planets moved round the 
 sun, they gave us an orderly and simple 
 astronomical system Instead of a disor- 
 derly and complicated one; yet the Coper- 
 nican system was condemned by conserva- 
 tive men as impious, because they had been 
 brought up to believe that God had made 
 the world in a different way and they could 
 find scripture texts which seemed to sup- 
 port their position. We have learned 
 better. We have found out that God's 
 rulership of the universe is not dependent 
 upon the relative positions of the earth 
 and the sun in our planetary system; and 
 we leave it to men like John Jasper to make 
 it a fundamental doctrine of the church 
 that "the sun do move." But not all 
 churches have yet learned to treat the 
 principle of natural selection in the same 
 large-minded spirit. Men of standing and 
 
 37
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 influence In the community condemned the 
 theory that species had been created under 
 the operation of general laws, In the same 
 way and for nearly the same reason that 
 their ancestors two centuries earlier had 
 condemned the doctrine that the earth and 
 the other planets moved around the sun 
 under the operation of general laws. 
 
 Nor was this kind of misunderstanding 
 confined to the opponents of the Darwinian 
 theory. Many of those who supposed that 
 they were advocating it enthusiastically 
 preached it In forms which Its founder 
 would hardly have recognized and based 
 its advocacy on reasons which he would 
 have repudiated. "There Is a picture of 
 Charles Darwin In thousands of homes," 
 said a careful student of social problems, 
 "whose occupants care nothing for science 
 and know nothing of what Darwin really 
 said, but who revere him because he Is an 
 intellectual force on which their priests 
 
 38
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 have declared war. They love him, not 
 for the order that he has introduced into 
 our thinking, but for the disorder which he 
 has been falsely charged with introduc- 
 ing." For one man who knows Darwin 
 at first hand — careful, peaceful, and 
 slow to generalize — there are twenty who 
 identify him with the diatribes of Haeckel 
 or the metaphysical theories of Herbert 
 Spencer. 
 
 We shall best understand the true sig- 
 nificance of Darwinism if we dissociate it 
 from the polemics which have been waged 
 about it and the philosophies which have 
 connected themselves with it, and treat it 
 for what it was — an orderly explanation of 
 facts which previously had not been ex- 
 plained; the last, and in many respects the 
 most novel, of the three great theoretical 
 discoveries which the nineteenth century 
 has contributed to the development of 
 modern science. 
 
 39
 
 Ill 
 
 NEW VIEWS OF POLITICS AND OF 
 ETHICS 
 
 ^ I ^HE political thought of Europe suice 
 -*- 1789 has passed through three 
 phases or stages: the revolutionary stage 
 from 1789 to 1 8 15, the individualistic 
 stage from 181 5 to 1848, and the nation- 
 alistic stage from 1848 onward. 
 
 The ideals of the revolutionary thinkers 
 were summed up in the three watchwords, 
 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These 
 were not mere phrases, as some people are 
 inclined to assume. They represented 
 important political ideals and aspirations. 
 But none of these watchwords meant quite 
 what we are apt to think it did. The 
 Frenchmen of 1789 did not understand the 
 term liberty as an American or English- 
 man understands it. They did not mean 
 
 40
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 the right of each man to mind his own 
 business, or what he regarded as his own 
 business; they meant the right of every 
 man to mind other people's business. They 
 meant by liberty much more nearly what 
 we now mean by democracy. They wanted 
 to put the government directly into the 
 hands of the voters, with as few limitations 
 as possible upon popular action. Liberty, 
 in their minds, was not only opposed to 
 monarchy, which put the government in 
 the hands of a sovereign; but it was 
 almost equally opposed to constitution- 
 alism, which compelled the government 
 to proceed deliberately and to exercise its 
 power within traditional limits and by 
 traditional methods. 
 
 Nor did they understand the term 
 equality as meaning communism, though 
 some of the leaders of the French Revolu- 
 tion in its later stages were themselves 
 communists. They did not intend to 
 
 41
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 abolish property. They did not even 
 intend to abolish all inequalities of owner- 
 ship or condition. Equality meant govern- 
 ment under general laws that applied to all 
 people alike, as distinct from the system 
 of privilege or class legislation that had 
 prevailed in France up to the close of the 
 last century — with one law for the noble, 
 another for the priest, another for the 
 merchant, and another for the farmer. 
 
 Nor did the term fraternity mean the 
 practical exercise of brotherly love. It 
 meant an aspiration toward harmony of 
 interests among different members of the 
 human race instead of the helium omnium 
 contra omnes which earlier philosophers 
 had assumed to be the natural and normal 
 state. When the French Revolutionists 
 added the word fraternity to the words 
 liberty and equality, they meant that by 
 putting government in the hands of the 
 people and governing under general laws, 
 
 42
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 they expected to govern for the good of 
 humanity as a whole. Fraternity was 
 opposed to intellectual selfishness, whether 
 individual or national. 
 
 The French Revolution came and went. 
 After a quarter of a century of struggle 
 the first of the objects of the Revolution- 
 ists — liberty as its champions conceived 
 it — remained unrealized. The second and 
 third objects, equality and fraternity, were 
 secured to a substantial degree. 
 
 The experiment of putting unrestricted 
 power into the hands of the people had 
 failed. Pure or unconstitutional democ- 
 racy had worked so badly that it wrought 
 its own ruin. France and Germany had 
 gone back to the hands of the old monar- 
 chical families. But equality — government 
 of the people under general laws — had 
 worked well. The communities that en- 
 joyed its benefits increased rapidly in pros- 
 perity and in intelligence. Prior to 1789 
 
 43
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 England and America had been the only 
 countries where the general principles of 
 the law applied indiscriminately to every- 
 body, instead of applying in one way to the 
 noble and in another way to the peasant. 
 The result was that the standard of life 
 of the people in England and America had 
 been much better than in France or Ger- 
 many. When the system of equality was 
 applied to France the general condition of 
 the French people was quick to improve. 
 When the same thing was applied to west- 
 ern Germany, even though it was imposed 
 by a foreign hand, western Germany re- 
 sponded in the same fashion. The Napo- 
 leonic code gave it better government than 
 it had ever had before. The people 
 became accustomed to look at law as a 
 thing to be applied impartially to all indi- 
 viduals, instead of differently for different 
 classes. Down to the present day there 
 is a contrast in the public attitude on this 
 
 44
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 matter between those parts of Germany 
 where the code prevailed and those where 
 it did not. 
 
 In a remarkable letter to his brother, 
 Napoleon said that the sentiment which 
 would result from this kind of government 
 would be a strong barrier against the 
 attempt of states like Prussia and Austria 
 to reconquer western Germany. His pre- 
 vision was fulfilled, though in a different 
 manner from what he expected. The 
 code did not prevent Prussia and Austria 
 from returning into power in the German 
 Confederation; but it did prevent them 
 from exercising that power to put things 
 back where they were before. The petty 
 princes in Germany were no more able to 
 abolish the principle of equality than were 
 the Bourbons in France. They would have 
 been glad to do so, for they hated it with 
 all their hearts; but it was beyond their 
 power. Napoleon's military successes 
 
 45
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 had been followed by defeat. His legal 
 success in establishing the code that bears 
 his name was more permanent, and gives 
 him, I think, a firmer title to fame than 
 did his military victories. The Bourbons 
 could overthrow democracy, because de- 
 mocracy had worked badly. They could 
 not overthrow equality, because equality 
 had worked well. 
 
 Nor did they overthrow the aspirations 
 and aims which were embodied in the term 
 fraternity. In fact, they tried to annex 
 them and use them for their own purposes. 
 The sovereigns who formed the Holy 
 Alliance during the years from 1815 to 
 1825 claimed to be serving the sacred 
 cause of humanity when they persecuted 
 republicans, just as glibly as did the Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety when they perse- 
 cuted Royalists a generation earlier; and 
 in each case it is probable that many of 
 the perpetrators of deeds of violence 
 
 46
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 honestly believed that they were dohig it 
 for the good of all mankind. Alexander 
 of Russia and St. Just of the Terror had 
 more in common than either of them would 
 have liked to admit. What was true to 
 some degree of monarchs was true to an 
 even larger degree of political and literary 
 leaders. Enthusiasm for the human race 
 as a w^hole was fashionable. The religion 
 of humanity became a watchword. The 
 statement of the utilitarians that moral and 
 political good meant neither more nor less 
 than the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number, was accepted as an axiom or 
 postulate of ethical science. 
 
 Taking the principle of equality before 
 the law as a starting point, and the attain- 
 ment of the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number as a goal, Jeremy Ben- 
 tham and his followers developed the 
 
 system of political philosophy known as 
 
 47
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 individualism. Bentham's Fragment on 
 Government, like Adam Smith's Wealth 
 of Nations, appeared in i^yS; but the full 
 working out of his theories was reserved 
 for the century following, when a suc- 
 cession of brilliant English and French 
 writers, beginning with Ricardo and end- 
 ing with John Stuart Mill, undertook to 
 make them the basis of social order and 
 social progress. 
 
 The underlying idea of individualism is 
 that the free action of intelligent men, 
 working out their own ideas independently, 
 will produce a good collective result for 
 the community. The individualist is essen- 
 tially an optimist. He believes that en- 
 lightened selfishness tends to make a man 
 do well for others besides himself, and 
 that the work of the law maker consists 
 chiefly in giving each man a fair chance 
 to pursue his own ends with as much 
 enlightenment and as little interference as 
 
 48
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 possible. The statement which is fre- 
 quently made that individualism regards 
 humanity as made up of disconnected and 
 warring atoms — I quote this from an 
 address by the Bishop of Durham twenty- 
 five years ago — is precisely the reverse of 
 the truth. The individualist believes that 
 men naturally work together instead of 
 apart; and his mistakes, such as they are, 
 arise from exaggerating the harmony of 
 human interests instead of underrating it. 
 I have spoken of individualism as dat- 
 ing from Ricardo and Bentham. But its 
 origin is really to be sought in the decisions 
 of the English common law judges during 
 the three or four centuries that had pre- 
 ceded. These judges discovered the prin- 
 ciple of competition and the beneficent 
 results that competition would produce. 
 They saw that if a baker charged too high 
 a price for his bread, the thing to do was 
 
 to encourage other bakers to come into the 
 
 49
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 same community and increase the supply. 
 The self-interest of the bakers would pro- 
 duce better results than the punitive action 
 of the magistrates. Of course there were 
 exceptions which had to be dealt with by 
 exceptional methods. There were times 
 when the high price of bread was the 
 result of a conspiracy, and then it was 
 right to punish the conspirators. But in 
 nine cases out of ten the high price was 
 the symptom of scarcity; and the best 
 way of dealing with the evil was to make 
 it for the interest of other people to come 
 and lower the price by the only method 
 that was permanently effectual — by the 
 offer of additional supplies. When a man 
 finds the best market for his own goods 
 he is generally rendering the maximum 
 service to other men. 
 
 But though the English judges appre- 
 hended and stated this principle clearly, 
 they were far from appreciating how 
 
 50
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 widely it could be applied. They used it 
 as a means of justifying certain methods 
 of price regulation and rejecting certain 
 other methods. It was not until the latter 
 part of the eighteenth century that Adam 
 Smith showed how this principle could be 
 made the basis, not merely for deciding a 
 few judicial controversies, but for explain- 
 ing the causes that determine the wealth 
 of nations. It was not until the generation 
 after Adam Smith that it became the 
 foundation of an organized system of 
 political economy, as developed by Ricardo 
 and Malthus and their associates. Prin- 
 ciples which had been buried for centuries 
 in law books and law reports now became 
 matter of common interest, because the 
 time was ripe for their acceptance. The 
 public mind of that generation welcomed 
 the theory that free competition among 
 individuals and free trade among nations 
 
 represented the normal condition of busi- 
 
 51
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 ness activity, and that any interference with 
 this condition was at best an unfortunate 
 necessity. Nor was the application of 
 these theories confined to the field of 
 economics. Herbert Spencer, in one of 
 his earher works, his Social Statics, tried 
 to show how the exercise of individual 
 intelligence would produce the same kind 
 of results in politics and in morals that it 
 did in business. "The best government is 
 that which governs least" — this was a 
 phrase so often repeated that it became 
 a proverb and took its place in the book 
 of current phrases, along with that similar 
 mixture of wisdom and unwisdom, "Happy 
 is the nation that has no history." 
 
 To people who look at politics and 
 morals in this way, the actual form of 
 government may become a matter of rela- 
 tively little concern. The less the sover- 
 eign does the less does it matter who is 
 
 sovereign. If the citizens are to be al- 
 
 52
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 lowed to direct their own affairs as much 
 as possible, it is of comparatively little 
 consequence whether the government is 
 elective or hereditary, democratic or 
 aristocratic. 
 
 For a long time the individualists had 
 everything their own way. The monopo- 
 lies and privileges granted in the eight- 
 eenth century had been so bad that their 
 removal did much good and little harm. 
 The restrictions upon trade in different 
 communities had been so arbitrary that the 
 removal of these restrictions tended to 
 increase prosperity in at least nine cases 
 out of ten. The liberty which people 
 sought in the days following the downfall 
 of Napoleon was the English kind of 
 liberty rather than the French kind of 
 liberty — freedom to pursue one's own 
 course with as little interference from 
 others as possible, rather than freedom to 
 hold frequent elections in order that the 
 
 53
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 majority of men might decide what the 
 minority should be compelled to do. For 
 a long time the voice of Hegel was the 
 only important one that was lifted in pro- 
 test. But as early as 1830 symptoms of a 
 somewhat widespread reaction in thought 
 began to make themselves manifest — 
 reaction against individualism and in favor 
 of socialism. It is rather interesting to 
 note that the word "socialism" was coined 
 to designate, not so much a positive theory 
 or programme, as a protest against indi- 
 vidualism and its consequences; to express 
 by a single phrase the attitude of those 
 who did not believe that the needs of the 
 community could be met by the independ- 
 ent action of its individual members. 
 
 The first attacks of the socialists were 
 not directed against the general principle 
 that free play of individual activity would 
 produce the best results for the commu- 
 nity, but against the idea that there could 
 
 54
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 be, under existing legal conditions, any- 
 thing like free play of individual activity. 
 There is not equality of opportunity, said 
 Marx; and any results which are predi- 
 cated upon an alleged equality of oppor- 
 tunity for all men must be false results. 
 Theoretically you expect all to share alike 
 in the benefits of competition. Practically 
 it may mean the exploitation of the weak 
 by the strong. Theoretically you say that 
 every one has a fair chance at the gains of 
 industrial enterprise. Practically the man 
 who has gotten hold of capital, whether 
 by good fortune, by inheritance, or by ras- 
 cality, has an advantage which it is hard 
 for any one else to overcome. It is only 
 too easy to find cases where the laborers 
 have been in fact exploited; cases where 
 the freest opportunity to trade has pro- 
 duced inequality instead of equality. By a 
 skilful citation and presentation of these 
 cases, the socialists excited the laborers of 
 
 55
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 European cities to a ferment which culmi- 
 nated in the Revolution of 1848. 
 
 The immediate effect of this Revolution 
 was to bring radical leaders to the front 
 and give them a chance to try their 
 theories. The result of this trial was not 
 successful. A few months' experiment 
 with the practical workings of socialism 
 dealt the cause a blow from which it took 
 it at least a generation to recover. How- 
 ever good the theories of Marx might 
 sound, the practical application of them 
 was disastrous. But in spite of this failure 
 and the resulting discredit of socialism, 
 people did not go back to the old ideas of 
 free trade and enthusiasm for the cause of 
 humanity. National aspirations had been 
 awakened by the Revolution; national 
 feelings and sentiments came into play. 
 Though the efforts of Hungary and of 
 Italy in 1849 were crushed, the spirit which 
 they engendered remained and grew 
 
 56
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 Strong. Italy became a nation in 1859; 
 the United States, in 1865; Germany, in 
 1866. Russia proclaimed herself the 
 champion of Slavonic unity, and in 1878 
 succeeded in freeing the peoples of the 
 lower Danube from the domination of 
 Turkey. The sentiment of patriotism 
 grew; the sentiment of humanitarianism 
 was forced into the background. The man 
 who was an intense patriot found it hard 
 to be devoted to the religion of humanity. 
 A good American cared more for his fel- 
 low Americans than he did for those who 
 had been unfortunate enough to be born in 
 England or France or Germany and be- 
 nighted enough to remain there. It was 
 the same way with other countries. "The 
 whole Eastern question is not worth the 
 blood of a single soldier from the German 
 fatherland," was the remark of no less a 
 person than Bismarck himself, the greatest 
 
 leader in all this nationalistic movement. 
 
 57
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 In the years which followed the Revo- 
 lution of 1848, a large part of the social- 
 istic sentiment turned itself into the new 
 "nationalistic" channels opened for it by 
 men like Bismarck and Cavour. While 
 Marx was vainly striving to keep the 
 "International" together, Ferdinand Las- 
 salle and his followers welcomed the 
 growth of national government as a means 
 of curbing the power of industrial organi- 
 zations. Bismarck wanted to strengthen 
 the king of Prussia; Lassalle wanted to 
 weaken the bankers in Frankfort. For 
 the moment the interests of the two coin- 
 cided. I shall not attempt to trace in 
 detail the history of the nationalistic move- 
 ment which changed loose federations of 
 states to strong centralized governments, 
 and produced successively a united Italy, 
 a united America, and a united Germany. 
 I shall simply call your attention to its 
 effect in producing two industrial conse- 
 
 58
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 quences of great importance, high tariffs 
 and large standing armies — or, if you pre- 
 fer to express the change in abstract terms 
 Instead of concrete ones, protection and 
 militarism, 
 
 Down to i860 Europe had moved grad- 
 ually but surely in the direction of free 
 trade. Tariffs were lowered; international 
 exchange of products was encouraged by 
 the statesmen of the several countries. It 
 was held that if different nations had 
 advantages for producing different sets of 
 goods, the gain by trade was mutual; in 
 short, that division of labor between 
 nations was as natural and normal a thing 
 as division of labor between individuals. 
 With the advent of the nationalistic spirit 
 there arose a desire on the part of each 
 people to be sufficient for itself; a feeling 
 that trade with other nations meant de- 
 pendence upon other nations; a suspicion 
 that the gain in foreign commerce was not 
 
 59
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 a mutual advantage but an advantage that 
 accrued to the one that exported most 
 goods and got most gold in return. Tar- 
 iffs began to go up instead of to go down. 
 Taxes imposed temporarily as war meas- 
 ures were retained after the wars them- 
 selves had ceased. 
 
 In like manner the standing armies 
 which nations had supported during the 
 early part of the nineteenth century were 
 relatively small. Even those countries like 
 Germany or Austria, which had a large 
 and officious internal police, maintained 
 comparatively small military establish- 
 ments for defense against their neighbors. 
 The years following i860 witnessed a 
 change in this respect also. The system of 
 compulsory military service for the whole 
 body of grown men was enforced by 
 Bismarck and Moltke, until it was pos- 
 sible to convert the nation Into an armed 
 camp on a few days' notice. The successes 
 
 60
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 of Prussia against Austria in 1866 and 
 France in 1870 caused the other nations 
 of the European continent to model their 
 estabhshments upon that of Prussia. The 
 desire of different peoples to have colonies 
 in which to make money, and world-wide 
 possessions to give an imperial character 
 to their dominion, led to an increase in 
 the world's navies proportionate to that 
 which had already come about in the 
 world's armies. So definite is the popular 
 conviction of the necessity of these mili- 
 tary establishments and so profound the 
 distrust that each nation feels concerning 
 the intentions of its neighbors, that the 
 proposal made at the beginning of the 
 first Hague Conference to reduce by 
 mutual agreement the armed forces of the 
 powers represented was definitively re- 
 jected and came near wrecking the success 
 of the conference as a whole. 
 
 We no longer assume that the interests 
 
 61
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 of nations are identical. We no longer 
 assume that it is desirable to remove bar- 
 riers that separate humanity into different 
 parts. We have pretty much abolished 
 "fraternity." We are so full of national 
 aspirations that human aspirations fall 
 into the background. Each nation wants 
 to be the strongest. If a change in the 
 tariff law hurts England or Germany, we 
 think that it is probably good for America. 
 In place of a well-ordered harmony of 
 interests, which the statesmen of 1850 
 tried in their various ways to compass, the 
 statesmen of 1900 content themselves with 
 some semblance of order in their antag- 
 onisms. 
 
 This change of feeling about politics and 
 about trade was accompanied by a similar 
 change of feeling about morals. 
 
 Down to the middle of the century 
 
 there had been a tendency to assume that 
 
 62
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 the interests of the individual and the 
 interests of the community were identical, 
 and that any seeming antagonism between 
 the two was due to want of intelligence. 
 Rational selfishness and rational unselfish- 
 ness were thought to lead to identical 
 results. If you could only teach a man to 
 know what was really good for him he 
 would do what was good for the commu- 
 nity, and be rewarded by permanent pros- 
 perity and by the approval of his fellow 
 men, instead of doing what he thought 
 good for himself and getting his reward 
 in the shape of pleasures of a lower or 
 less lasting character. This was a com- 
 fortable theory to hold. If you believed 
 people were going to be selfish in any 
 event, it was pleasant to think that their 
 selfishness would have good results for 
 others. If you were anxious to have the 
 community prosperous, it was pleasant to 
 think that this end could be secured by 
 
 63
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 appeals to individual self-interest no less 
 than to individual public spirit. But there 
 were so many cases where things did not 
 work that way — where selfishness went 
 without punishment and unselfishness with- 
 out reward — that this theory of harmony 
 of interests was abandoned. Some men, 
 like Carlyle, boldly attacked liberty and 
 proclaimed themselves champions of au- 
 thority. The necessary and desirable thing 
 for a nation, according to Carlyle, was not 
 to let each man take his own way, but to 
 let all men unite in obeying the strongest 
 and best. Those who continued to defend 
 liberty did so, not because the free action 
 of the individual necessarily produced the 
 best results for the community, but because 
 it gave people the best chance of finding 
 who was fitted to lead. 
 
 In England, the break between the old 
 and the new liberalism was not a sharp or 
 sudden one. The English liberals, under 
 
 64
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 the leadership of John Stuart Mill, grad- 
 ually and almost insensibly gave up the 
 belief that individual selfishness would 
 produce the best results for the commu- 
 nity, and substituted the doctrine that 
 individual freedom would allow the com- 
 munity to watch the results of different 
 experiments to see which it should stamp 
 with its approval. John Morley, the best 
 exponent of this new school of thought, 
 says with justice, that Carlyle and his 
 followers appealed to men to follow the 
 hero, but never gave any directions how 
 to find him; while Mill's doctrine laid 
 down the main conditions of finding your 
 hero, namely: that all roads should be 
 left open to him, because no living man 
 knew by which road he would come. 
 
 While the discussion was thus waged in 
 England between men like Carlyle and 
 Ruskin on the one side, and Mill and Mor- 
 ley on the other, a school of thinkers on 
 
 65 
 
 J
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 the Continent had grappled with the ques- 
 tion in their own fashion and given a 
 bolder, though not a sounder, answer. 
 Rational conduct, they said, was neces- 
 sarily calculated selfishness. If this selfish- 
 ness of the individual would not work, out 
 benefits for the community as a whole, so 
 much the worse for the community. Life, 
 in the view of these men, is a struggle 
 between many types of men, in which each 
 individual strives to develop his powers 
 and make his will the dominant one. The 
 best man is the one who succeeds. 
 
 Friedrich Nietzsche is commonly re- 
 garded as the leader of this school, which, 
 among the many perversions of Darwin- 
 ism, is perhaps the most perverse. But 
 Nietzsche himself was a writer of aphor- 
 isms rather than a framer of systems. 
 For a connected statement of the results 
 of his thinking we must look rather to the 
 work of his followers. Take, for instance, 
 
 66
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 the book of Loria, on The Economic 
 
 Foundations of the Constitution of Society. 
 
 Right, says Loria, is a mere convention — 
 
 what each nation chooses to make it. A 
 
 few men get hold of authority; they make 
 
 rules to benefit themselves at the expense 
 
 of other members of society. If these 
 
 rules are simply laws and nothing more. It 
 
 is necessary to have police to enforce them. 
 
 Police are very expensive ; and moreover 
 
 the police, like the Turkish janizaries, may 
 
 take it into their heads to enforce the laws 
 
 against you instead of against somebody 
 
 else. It is therefore more convenient and 
 
 effective to do away with the necessity for 
 
 so many police, by persuading the people 
 
 that these laws have supernatural sanction 
 
 and that the gods will punish them if the 
 
 police do not. This, they say, is the origin 
 
 and real nature of morality. Let the 
 
 enlightened man emancipate himself from 
 
 these delusions. Let him see that law Is a 
 
 67 
 
 W
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 convention and morality a superstition. 
 Let him realize to the utmost his own indi- 
 vidual purposes and individual aims. Play 
 the game for yourself: — this, says the fol- 
 lower of Nietzsche, is the only rational 
 theory of conduct, this the only philosophic 
 view of life. 
 
 This sounds like dangerous advice. So 
 it is — for the man that follows it. A high- 
 minded philosopher of this school, like 
 Nietzsche himself, becomes insane; a low- 
 minded philosopher of this school, like 
 D'Annunzio, falls into animalism. If the 
 current system of morality be an illusion, 
 it is at any rate an illusion that protects 
 the man and the race that hold it. If the 
 rejection of tradition and rule in the effort 
 to play the game for one's self be enlight- 
 enment, it is the enlightenment that leads 
 to the ditch on the one hand or the quag- 
 mire on the other. Whatever may be the 
 errors or the dangers in the complacent 
 
 68
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 optimism of English philosophers, they 
 have proved infinitely less destructive than 
 the complacent, not to say brutal, pessi- 
 mism of their brethren on the Continent. 
 Both these modes of thought appear to 
 be giving place to a new philosophy, or 
 perhaps I should rather say, to a new view 
 of life, known by the somewhat unfortu- /}\ 
 nate name of pragmatism. Of this phi- 
 losophy, which is essentially a development 
 of John Morley's theory of toleration, 
 William James was the first popular advo- 
 cate. Henri Bergson of Paris is today its 
 best recognized exponent. In spite of all 
 that these eminent writers have done, the 
 most compact and useful statement of the 
 principles of pragmatism is found in the 
 fifth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. 
 I am not now referring to the early part 
 of the chapter, that treats of the doings of 
 a man named Ananias; but to the latter 
 part, from which I made a brief quotation 
 
 69
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 in the previous lecture, giving the counsel 
 of a wiser man named Gamaliel, a doctor 
 of the law, who said concerning the 
 apostles : 
 
 "Ye men of Israel, take heed to your- 
 selves what ye intend to do as touching 
 these men. 
 
 "For before these days rose up Theudas, 
 boasting himself to be somebody; to whom 
 a number of men, about four hundred, 
 joined themselves: who was slain; and all, 
 as many as obeyed him, were scattered, 
 and brought to nought. 
 
 "After this man rose up Judas of Gali- 
 lee in the days of the taxing, and drew 
 away much people after him: he also 
 perished; and all, even as many as obeyed 
 him, were dispersed. 
 
 "And now I say unto you. Refrain from 
 
 these men, and let them alone : for if this 
 
 counsel or this work be of men, it will 
 
 come to nought : 
 
 70
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 "But if it be of God, ye cannot over- 
 throw it; lest haply ye be found even to 
 fight against God," 
 
 The criterion which shows whether a 
 thing is right or wrong is its permanence. 
 Survival is not merely the characteristic of 
 right; it Is the test of right. This Is what 
 distinguishes the philosophy of the prag- 
 matlst from that of Herbert Spencer. Her- 
 bert Spencer made up his mind what he 
 thought was right, and then tried to prove 
 that the universe was working in that 
 direction. The pragmatlst tries to find, 
 with as little prejudice as possible, the 
 direction In which the universe is work- 
 ing; and he makes that the criterion of 
 right. Spencer was fundamentally a meta- 
 physician. Although he had a prodigious 
 knowledge of fact, he was constantly try- 
 ing to arrange the facts to fit his theories. 
 The philosopher of today, even when he 
 is using the same terms, is concerned rather 
 
 71
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 to make his theories fit the facts. He may 
 not always succeed, but in method and 
 purpose he has a fundamental advantage 
 over the evolutionist of the generation that 
 preceded him. 
 
 In the lower forms of animal life, 
 where the struggle is between individuals, 
 the plant or the animal that survives is the 
 one we call best, because it is best adapted 
 to its purpose. As we come higher up in 
 the scale the struggle is no longer between 
 individuals but between families, between 
 groups, and ultimately between different 
 systems of ethics. It is no longer the most 
 perfectly developed individual, but the 
 most perfectly organized group or the 
 most perfectly harmonized system that 
 prevails and thereby proves its right to 
 prevail. It is here that the pragmatist 
 takes issue with Nietzsche and his fol- 
 lowers. The struggle between individuals 
 within the group, though not entirely 
 
 72
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 abolished, Is and must be subordinated to 
 the discipline of the group and the rules 
 of the aspirations of the group, lest all 
 perish together. We hold the beliefs 
 which have preserved our fathers. It is 
 not far from the truth to say that we hold 
 them because they have preserved our 
 fathers. I do not mean that we should 
 consciously adopt a belief because it is use- 
 ful to us, as James seems to imply. I 
 would rather take the ground that we hold 
 the belief that has preserved our fathers 
 as an intuition and act on it as an instinct. 
 The surest knowledge, according to the 
 pragmatist, is that which has been thus 
 established by the habit of generations 
 until it becomes intuitive. Reasoning is 
 of the nature of exploration. If we have 
 to reason, it means that there is an absence 
 of consensus of opinion among our fellows, 
 and probably an absence of certainty in 
 our own minds. I think it possible that 
 
 73
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 every thoroughgoing pragmatist ten years 
 hence will say that what we know we know 
 by instinct, and the use of the intellect is a 
 confession of ignorance. This much at 
 least is certain: that the better we know 
 how to do a thing, the less do we have to 
 make conscious use of our reasoning in 
 doing it. 
 
 What then is the bearing of all this 
 psychology on political and moral phil- 
 osophy? To bring us back to the funda- 
 mental truth that we are members one of 
 another. Society is not a mere aggrega- 
 tion of individuals bound together by ties 
 of self-interest, as philosophers would 
 have told us in the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century; still less is it an aggrega- 
 tion of individuals set apart from one 
 another by the struggle for existence, as 
 some men were telling us twenty-five years 
 ago. Human history represents a struggle 
 
 of groups rather than a struggle of sepa- 
 
 74
 
 POLITICS AND ETHICS 
 
 rate men and women. The moral and 
 religious instincts that bind the group 
 together, which some men, not so many 
 years ago, were condemning as outworn 
 prejudices, count for even more than the 
 Individual intelligence. In our practical 
 philosophy, of politics and of life, we are 
 reverting to the words of Edmund Burke: 
 "We are afraid to put men to live and 
 trade each on his own private stock of 
 reason, because we suspect that this stock 
 in each man Is small, and that the Indi- 
 viduals would do better to avail themselves 
 of the general bank and capital of nations 
 and of ages. Many of our men of specu- 
 lation, instead of exploding general preju- 
 dices, employ their sagacity to discover the 
 latent wisdom which prevails in them. If 
 they find what they seek, and they seldom 
 fail, they think it more wise to continue 
 the prejudice with the reason involved, 
 than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and 
 
 75
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 to leave nothing but the naked reason: 
 because prejudice with its reason has a 
 motive to give action to that reason, and 
 an affection which will give it perma- 
 nence Prejudice renders a man's 
 
 virtue his habit, and not a series of uncon- 
 nected acts. Through just prejudice, his 
 duty becomes a part of his nature." 
 
 76
 
 IV 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL BASIS OF RECENT 
 POETRY 
 
 THE world changes the modes of Its 
 religious feeling and thought as it 
 changes the modes of its political feeling 
 and thought. The two sets of changes go 
 hand in hand. An age of political com- 
 placence is usually an age of religious 
 complacence. An age of political struggle 
 is almost always an age of religious 
 struggle. We think of the Reformation 
 as a religious movement, and we think of 
 the French Revolution as a political move- 
 ment; but the Reformation was a time of 
 political upheavals no less than of reli- 
 gious ones, and the French Revolution was 
 marked by just as profound convulsions 
 in the world of religion as in the world of 
 
 politics. 
 
 77
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 In the ages of peace, when authority 
 Is accepted as a matter of course, the 
 rehgious element in literature is apt to 
 be essentially mystical — a confession of 
 human weakness, an expression of human 
 aspirations, a devout homage from a man 
 who feels himself weak to a God who is 
 immeasurably above him. In the ages of 
 conflict and upheaval religious literature 
 takes a different character. The time no 
 longer calls for meditation, but for fight- 
 ing — for fighting in which each man's own 
 individual work may be overwhelmingly 
 important. The sense of humility gives 
 place to the feeling of responsibility; the 
 vagueness of the aspiration to be like God 
 gives place to the assertion of the over- 
 whelming importance of bringing God and 
 the world together. The peaceful devo- 
 tion of the psalmist is overborne by the 
 convulsive struggles of the prophet. The 
 
 quiet of the gods is invaded by the cries 
 
 78
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 of humanity. Their very authority is 
 challenged by the indomitable will of 
 Prometheus, the friend of man. In such 
 an age it is no longer to the voice of David, 
 but to that of Ezekiel, that we respond. 
 It Is no longer the song of Hesiod or even 
 of Pindar, but the song of Aeschylus and 
 of Euripides, that moves men. 
 
 A single instance, chosen to illustrate 
 this contrast, will show what I mean better 
 than any amount of description. 
 
 In a passage of In Memoriam, much 
 admired at the time of its publication and 
 still much quoted, Tennyson voiced the 
 religious thought of a large part of the 
 English-speaking world of his day in the 
 following lines: 
 
 " So runs my dream : but what am I ? 
 An infant crying in the night: 
 An infant crying for the light: 
 And with no language but a cry." 
 
 Not quite fifty years later another poet, 
 
 79
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 Henley, less known to the casual reader 
 but not less significant in the history of 
 English literature, put these burning words 
 on paper: 
 
 " Out of the night that covers me, 
 Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul." 
 
 In time these two utterances are less 
 than half a century apart; in spirit fifty 
 centuries would not measure the difference. 
 
 The first half of the nineteenth century 
 was an age of religious peace — an age 
 when church authority was accepted as a 
 fact, whether the people believed in the 
 doctrines of the church or not. Their 
 doubt and disbelief were essentially intel- 
 lectual things which did not greatly affect 
 their outward conduct or even their inward 
 feelings. The ideal and the aim of those 
 who put their religious emotions into 
 poetry was quiet submission to the author- 
 
 80
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 ity of God. They were content to accept 
 as mysteries the things that they could not 
 understand, and by this acceptance to 
 achieve in their own souls the peace of 
 God that passeth understanding. The 
 second half of the century was an age of 
 religious effort, of struggle. The religious 
 poetry of the time, and a great deal that 
 was not avowedly religious, was con- 
 cerned with finding man's place in that 
 struggle. The God of the later days was 
 one who had come not to send peace but 
 a sword; the true man of the later days 
 was the one who tried unflinchingly to do 
 his part, who never shrank from the con- 
 flict because he could not see the end. To 
 accept the burdens and the mistakes of 
 conflict rather than seek refuge in the quiet 
 haven of mysticism — this is the message of 
 the last years of the nineteenth century. 
 No longer do we content ourselves with 
 
 saying, as Tennyson did: 
 
 81
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 " Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
 Our wills are ours, to make them thine." 
 
 We deem it a truer, as well as a nobler 
 conception of life, to say with the more 
 modern poet: 
 
 " East and west and north, wherever the battle 
 
 grew, 
 Forth to a feast we fared, the work of the will 
 
 to do. 
 Pillar of cloud by day, by night a pillar of fire. 
 Sons of the will, we fought the fight of the will 
 
 our sire." 
 
 I shall try to give an account, necessa-. 
 rily brief and imperfect, of the successive 
 steps by which this change in thought and 
 feeling was brought about. 
 
 In the latter part of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury there lived in London an artist named 
 William Blake; a genius, self-taught, 
 erratic, and ultimately quite crazy. He is 
 chiefly known by his etchings, which were 
 strange enough; but his writings are 
 stranger still. One of the most remark- 
 
 82
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 able of these writings is entitled The 
 Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In this 
 extraordinary little book, Blake takes up 
 the old theory of the Manichasans or 
 Gnostics, so well known to those who have 
 studied the early history of the Christian 
 church, and states it in terms of his own. 
 There are in the universe, he says, two 
 antagonistic principles: the force of vital- 
 ity, commonly called evil, and the force of 
 repression, commonly called good. Right 
 living depends on a proper balancing of 
 these two forces. Each has its place, and 
 its equal place, in the world's order and 
 the world's progress. That the principle 
 of repression has been called good and 
 that God has been identified with that side 
 of life, while the principle of vitality is 
 called evil and the spirit that underlies it 
 is called the Devil, is a mere accident, due 
 to the fact that all writers on morals have 
 been either priests or lawyers, both of 
 
 83
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 which classes are professional advocates 
 of repression. 
 
 Blake's philosophy did not find many 
 followers in England, either at the time 
 or for a century afterward; though each 
 of our two great American geniuses, Haw- 
 thorne and Poe, had a conception of the 
 spiritual universe like that which has just 
 been outlined. His first real successor is, 
 I believe, Bernard Shaw, who shows the 
 influence of this philosophy in several of 
 his plays, and in one — The Devil's Dis- 
 ciple — frankly accepts Blake's view of life 
 in its entirety. Blake is chiefly important 
 to us as the one great English exponent of 
 a movement which was at the time shak- 
 ing the thought of Continental Europe to 
 its foundations. In France, Rousseau was 
 preaching in different words the same mes- 
 sage as Blake, and finding converts by the 
 thousand. The right of the individual to 
 work out his own development in defiance 
 
 84
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 of social traditions; the right of the living 
 present to shake off the hand of the dead 
 past; the essential importance of doing 
 things, and the essential wrongness of try- 
 ing to stop people from doing things 
 because of mere conventions : these were 
 the thoughts that Rousseau and Rousseau's 
 followers were developing until they burst 
 the bounds of all convention in the great 
 Revolution of 1789. The same sort of 
 thing was happening in Germany. This 
 was the age which the historians of Ger- 
 man literature designate as the Sturm- iind 
 Drang-Periode — the period of storm and 
 stress. It was then that Schiller wrote his 
 tragedy of The Robbers. It was then that 
 Goethe conceived the original draft of his 
 first part of Faust. In The Robbers 
 Schiller voices the protest of the younger 
 men of the day against the tyranny of 
 external convention. In Faust Goethe 
 pictures the spirit of a man striving to 
 
 85
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 break down the shackles Imposed upon him 
 by his own finite nature and surroundings 
 and asserting equality with the spirit of the 
 universe. "Shall I quail before you, 
 creature of flame?" says Faust to the 
 embodied spirit of the world about him. 
 "It is I, Faust, your equal" — no less bold 
 in the assertion of equality because of the 
 enormous disparity in power. 
 
 The day of storm and stress passed. 
 The champions of individual freedom saw 
 their theories tried in the French Revolu- 
 tion; and the results of that trial made the 
 older and cooler heads among them ready 
 to go back at least part way to the old rule 
 of social conventions. Not that the voices 
 which asserted the right to individual 
 freedom and Individual development were 
 ever wholly stilled. The whole system of 
 German transcendental philosophy was 
 based upon the Idea of the Importance of 
 the ego. And there were In every genera- 
 
 86
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 tion, from Fichte at the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century to Nietzsche at the end 
 of it, philosophers who preached the right 
 of individual development in no uncertain 
 terms. But for a long time they had 
 slight influence on general literature and 
 on the general thought of the men who 
 were doing the world's work. Schiller's 
 later dramas show a return to conventional 
 types. The Faust of Goethe, as he took 
 It up and developed it In his maturer years, 
 Is a wholly different conception from the 
 Faust of the fragment. The new Faust 
 still desires to widen his experience and to 
 take within himself whatever of life the 
 world has to provide; but his note toward 
 the world and Its spirit Is no longer the 
 bold note of challenge or defiance. It Is 
 the somewhat weary note of a man who 
 feels that he has much to learn and rela- 
 tively little satisfaction In learning It. 
 The poetry of the early part of the 
 
 87
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 nineteenth century, whatever its merits, 
 makes no pretense of summoning the 
 reader to vigorous action as a man. It is 
 predominantly of the romantic school — 
 the school which seeks its golden age in 
 the past and which tries to take refuge 
 from the evils of today in the contempla- 
 tion of other and better things. The 
 results of the French Revolution had dis- 
 couraged people from preaching the doc- 
 trines on which that Revolution had been 
 based. A poet like Wordsworth, who 
 loves liberty, withdraws from the world 
 of action into that of contemplation. A 
 poet like Scott, who cares for the world 
 of action and is not willing to withdraw 
 from it, describes the ideals and aspira- 
 tions of ages which had less liberty than 
 we have today. Neither Wordsworth nor 
 Scott has a definite message to the fighting 
 men of the present. Wordsworth's mes- 
 sage is to the men of the present who are 
 
 88
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 not fighting, Scott's to the fighting men 
 who are not of the present. 
 
 As always happens in such cases, the 
 form of the poetry began to count for 
 more and more, the substance for less and 
 less. Poems, and to a less extent prose 
 works, became masterpieces of literary 
 art rather than bearers of a message. 
 Southey, Byron, Moore, Shelley, Keats — 
 where can you find a similar group of 
 authors who wrote so much that was so 
 good and yet left to the generation after 
 them so little except a row of pictures on 
 a wall? Nowhere unless it be the group 
 of English novelists of a few years later — 
 Bulwer, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray. 
 Small wonder that the Englishmen of the 
 forties and the fifties who wished to make 
 their reading a basis of action instead of 
 a mere diversion grasped at the outspoken 
 traditionalism of a Newman or of a 
 Ruskin, who had something of vital con- 
 
 89
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 cern in his heart! The message of a man 
 like Newman or Ruskin might be right or 
 it might be wrong; but it was in any event 
 the word of some one who beheved that 
 God had given him something to preach 
 to his fellow men. Therefore did men 
 listen, and therefore did they feel bitter 
 disappointment when they found that what 
 Newman said and what Ruskin said did 
 not in fact meet the needs of the age to 
 which they preached. On the Continent 
 of Europe, the "Young Hegelians" were 
 addressing themselves vigorously to pres- 
 ent-day problems; and for the time being 
 their writings took powerful hold of the 
 thought of Germany. But only faint 
 echoes of this movement reached England. 
 Yet there was one great English poet 
 of that day who had a message which did 
 meet the needs of the age. This was 
 Robert Browning. More fortunate than 
 
 Newman or Ruskin, his face was turned 
 
 90
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 toward the future instead of the past. He 
 did not tell people that because the night 
 was dark they must try to console them- 
 selves by the recollections of yesterday. 
 He helped them to prepare for tomorrow 
 as best they could. It was because he bore 
 such a message and proffered real help to 
 men who were trying to solve perplexing 
 questions . that he had power to make 
 strong men listen to him, instead of to 
 Swinburne or Morris or even Tennyson, 
 who had the lyric form but had not the 
 intellectual or emotional substance which 
 people were craving. 
 
 Browning speaks to men who are trying 
 to work out the problems of liberty. His 
 poetry always, even at its worst, contains 
 thoughts that help toward this end; and 
 his better poems are written in such a way 
 that they stimulate the emotions as well 
 as the thoughts which are needed in the 
 
 citizens of a free commonwealth. I say 
 
 91
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 his better poems; for Browning, though 
 fairly consistent as a thinker, Is as a writer 
 of English literature more unequal In his 
 different works than anybody since John 
 Bunyan. 
 
 Browning's philosophy of life was fairly 
 outlined, though not fully developed, In 
 1835. In his Paracelsus, published In that 
 year, he pictures the thoughts of a man 
 bent on realizing what there was In him- 
 self and on giving others the opportunity 
 to realize what there was In them; first 
 admired, then hated, but always living, 
 always going forward, and never so wholly 
 triumphant as when he dies outcast by his 
 fellows. Browning has gone back to 
 Blake's conception of vitality as a thing 
 essentially right and essentially necessary; 
 but he avoids Blake's error of linking the 
 name of God with the spirit of repression, 
 and making him the God of only half the 
 world. Instead of the whole. God is not 
 
 92
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 the God of conventions, though conven- 
 tions may be necessary; he is not the God 
 of the dead but of the Hving. "I have 
 Hved," says Paracelsus, when scoffing at 
 the idea that God requires "Pardon of him 
 because of praise denied"; "We only have 
 to live to set forth God's praise." But the 
 living must be something positive; not a 
 mere impatience of restraint; not the petty 
 law-breaking which constituted Shelley's 
 idea of what living meant, nor the middle- 
 sized law-breaking which pleases Bernard 
 Shaw, nor even the gigantic law-breaking 
 which Byron and afterward Swinburne 
 liked to imagine; but the living out a life 
 in which the aim for power goes hand in 
 hand with the love of one's fellow men, 
 and in which the disregard of laws and 
 conventions is only the bursting of the husk 
 when the seed develops into the plant. 
 
 To Blake the struggle between indi- 
 vidual vitality and the conventions that 
 
 93
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 repress it was necessarily a struggle 
 between two antagonistic principles — just 
 as it is to Bernard Shaw at the present 
 day. Browning took a saner and, as it 
 seems to me, a truer view of the nature 
 of the conflict. There are certain things 
 which the individual does to work out his 
 own destiny. There are other things 
 which organized society does to work out 
 its own safety and permanence as an 
 organization. An entire repression of the 
 individual means stagnation; an entire dis- 
 regard of social conventions in behalf of 
 the individual means anarchy. Somewhere 
 between the two we are bound to find 
 a way of right living; not as a result of a 
 balance between opposing forces, but as a 
 point where the needs both of the indi- 
 vidual and of society may be realized con- 
 currently. The repression of the indi- 
 vidual is not the end of the law. It is an 
 
 incident — an undesirable incident but often 
 
 94
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 a necessary one. Browning saw both sides 
 of this issue as few poets, or, for the 
 matter of that, few living men, have ever 
 been able to see both sides of any issue. 
 In Bishop Blougram's Apology, intellect- 
 ually one of the most remarkable poems 
 of the century, he gives us an illuminating 
 discussion, between a Catholic priest and 
 a literary free lance, concerning liberty of 
 thought and the propriety of suppressing 
 one's own individual convictions for the 
 sake of an ulterior end to be obtained. 
 Every man who reads this poem atten- 
 tively will understand many fundamental 
 things in life better than he did before. 
 An even more varied insight is shown in 
 The Ring and The Book, where the his- 
 tory of certain dark transactions is set 
 forth as it looks from different stand- 
 points — the injurer and the injured, the 
 lawyer and the man who breaks the law 
 from a desire to do right, with the pope's 
 
 95
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 own summation of the complexity of the 
 
 whole and the mixed Tightness and wrong- 
 
 ness of the different parts. For the 
 
 struggle of life with which we have to deal 
 
 is nothing so simple as a struggle between 
 
 marshalled forces of vitality on one side 
 
 and of repression on the other. It is a 
 
 struggle where the vitality of one man 
 
 craves for the restriction and repression 
 
 of others; where we must balance the 
 
 claims and demands of different kinds of 
 
 men and women and the value of different 
 
 kinds of social order. The poetry which 
 
 the man of action in the twentieth century 
 
 demands is poetry which will help him to 
 
 understand his place in that struggle and 
 
 inspire him to accept its burdens. It is 
 
 because Browning does this that men read 
 
 Browning when they are ceasing to read 
 
 men among his contemporaries who were 
 
 greater literary artists and greater masters 
 
 of poetic style. 
 
 96
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 But how shall good and evil be deter- 
 mined when there Is no pope to weigh the 
 motives? If Newman and Ruskln are 
 wrong In telling us to be guided by the 
 past, where shall a guide be found? These 
 were questions which poets and novelists 
 of the middle of the last century were 
 vainly trying to solve. The voice of com- 
 placency which had characterized the Hter- 
 ature of the generation earlier had given 
 place to the voice of protest. Carlyle, 
 KIngsley, the Brontes, George Eliot, all 
 in their several ways, were expressing 
 cravings which the past had not satisfied 
 and asking questions to which tradition 
 furnished no answer. Browning showed 
 us how to find the answer in many particu- 
 lar cases; to the question in Its broad form 
 even Browning did not give, or attempt to 
 give, a general answer. 
 
 The present generation thinks It has 
 found the way In which this answer Is to 
 
 97
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 be reached. The contest between man and 
 man or between system and system is not 
 a purposeless agency of destruction. It is 
 the means of proving which is the better 
 man or which the better system. Where 
 previous generations said, "Right must 
 prevail in the long run," and held it as a 
 somewhat dim article of religious faith, 
 the present generation sets out to discover 
 what is going to prevail in the long run, 
 in the full confidence that if this can be 
 found it will be right. And meantime, 
 while it strives to regulate struggles and 
 wars, it nevertheless accepts them, and to 
 some degree glorifies them, as a means of 
 proving all things that we may hold fast 
 that which is good. 
 
 " Good luck to those who see the end ! 
 Good-bye to those that drown! 
 To each his chance, as chance shall send, 
 And God for all! Shut down!" 
 
 98
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 That verse summarizes the theology of a 
 large part of the church militant as It 
 exists today. 
 
 But, you will ask, what Is meant by 
 characterizing this as a spiritual phil- 
 osophy, or as a true philosophy of any 
 kind? Is It not rather a glorification of 
 brute force? If it be true that men feel 
 thus and think thus. Is It not a deplorable 
 fact, full of danger for the future, rather 
 than a source of spiritual hope and 
 promise? Do not these doctrines nor- 
 mally result in an animalism like that of 
 D'AnnunzIo or a cynicism like that of 
 Bernard Shaw, rather than in zeal for 
 moral truth and in high ideals of what the 
 human race can be and ought to be? 
 
 This is a fair question, which needs to 
 be squarely answered. 
 
 If we encourage people to follow out 
 their own impulses, in the belief that time 
 will show which Impulses are good and 
 
 99
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 v/hlch impulses are bad, men of strong 
 animal instincts, with little judgment, will 
 be tempted to pursue careers of lust or 
 cruelty; and writers like D'Annunzio, who 
 have strong passions and little self-control, 
 will preach the doctrine that this exer- 
 cise of liberty is the normal conduct of 
 humanity — a sign of strength rather than 
 of weakness. But this kind of career 
 brings its own ruin; and this kind of litera- 
 ture carries with it its own refutation. 
 The men who follow their passions find 
 that they have taken the road to self- 
 destruction, not the road to power. The 
 men who have preached the gospel of 
 animalism find that it is a gospel of deca- 
 dence, not of life. If such a writer has eyes 
 to see and a heart to feel, he gradually 
 discovers the error of what he has done. 
 The Zola of UAssommoir and Nana gives 
 place to the Zola of La Debacle. The 
 writer who began by dwelling on corrup- 
 
 100
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 tion with an apparent love of the corrupt, 
 has ended by grasping, as few other men 
 have grasped it, the lesson that moral 
 corruption leads to the downfall of a 
 people. 
 
 Again, the man of mere intellectual 
 power, without strong human sympathies, 
 may take this doctrine as an encourage- 
 ment to treat life as a game, in Avhich it 
 is his sole duty to use his intelligence to 
 win. And a writer of this temperament 
 may take pleasure in analyzing life in this 
 spirit, to the detriment of all serious pur- 
 pose and serious feeling. This danger is 
 more real than the other, because the un- 
 sympathetic man frequently gets a consid- 
 erable measure of success and power, and 
 the unsympathetic writer may continue 
 writing for a long time before anything 
 happens to disprove his views. Yet even 
 with men of this type, the attempt to 
 follow out consequences honestly and write 
 
 101
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 Stories truthfully gradually leads to higher 
 instead of lower views of life. The early 
 dramas of Bernard Shaw contained much 
 amusing cynicism and little suggestion of 
 anything better. In Man and Superman 
 the cynicism has become, almost in spite 
 of itself, a vehicle for conveying spiritual 
 truth, none the less profound because of 
 its unconventional or irreverent form. I 
 know of nothing more striking in the way 
 of philosophic preaching than in Satan's 
 suggestion to the pious lady who has unex- 
 pectedly found herself in hell, that she 
 should go to heaven and try living there for 
 a while in order that she may see how 
 uncomfortable she would be in such a 
 place. When she asks with surprise 
 whether she would be allowed to go and 
 try, she is told that the only reason why 
 anybody ever stays in hell is because hell 
 is the only place for which they feel them- 
 selves suited. And when she inquires 
 
 102
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 whether a great many souls do not stay 
 in heaven a long time before they have 
 found out their mistake, there is a terrible 
 touch of truth as well as irony in Satan's 
 answer, so characteristic of Bernard Shaw, 
 that they are chiefly English souls who 
 have been brought up to think that they 
 were moral when they were only uncom- 
 fortable. The same evolution is seen in 
 the case of one greater than Bernard Shaw, 
 Ibsen. If ever there was a man whose 
 genius was predominantly intellectual and 
 whose passion was a passion for analysis, 
 it was Henrik Ibsen. There was a time 
 when people thought that his dramas 
 undermined faith in humanity. We now 
 see that what they chiefly undermined was 
 our faith in shams; and that pitiless expo- 
 sition of the consequences of what is weak 
 in modern life may serve as a sure means 
 to help us in deciding upon what we can 
 hold to as really strong. 
 
 103
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 For after all the lesson which observa- 
 tion teaches to the man of brains is the 
 same that instinct has taught the gentle- 
 man for many ages past: that in any con- 
 flict which is worthy of the name strength 
 counts for less than intelligence, intelli- 
 gence for less than discipline, discipline for 
 less than self-sacrifice; or, to put it in posi- 
 tive words, that unswerving devotion is 
 the thing that counts for most of all. The 
 grim wager of battle is, as Carlyle says, 
 full of glorious possibilities of life. Con- 
 flict is above and beyond all else a test of 
 loyalty. The more complex the struggle, 
 the more does the power to stand this test 
 come into the foreground as the decisive 
 element. This fact it is, more than all 
 others, which makes the modern philoso- 
 phy of conflict deserve the title of a spirit- 
 ual philosophy. It is because our D'An- 
 nunzios and our Shaws fail to recognize 
 this that they fall short of intellectual 
 
 104
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 greatness. It is because our Brownings 
 
 and our Kiplings recognize this fact that 
 
 they achieve a permanent hold on mankind. 
 
 If there Is one message more than 
 
 another with which modern EngHsh poetry 
 
 Is charged, it is this message of enduring 
 
 loyally. 
 
 " To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill success" 
 
 is Browning's text. 
 
 " Say not, 'The struggle naught availeth, 
 The labor and the wounds are vain; 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth. 
 And as things have been they remain.' 
 
 " If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
 It may be through yon smoke concealed 
 Your comrades chase even now the flyers, 
 And but for you possess the field," 
 
 sings Clough, a forerunner of the modern 
 school of poetry, taken away from us, 
 unfortunately, before the time of his full 
 fruition. It Is the Inspiration of this mes- 
 sage that lights up the bare rafters of the 
 
 105
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 mess room of the cholera-stricken officers 
 in Ceylon: 
 
 " So stand to your glasses steady, 
 For this a world of lies ; 
 Here's a glass to the dead already 
 And here's to the next that dies!" 
 
 It is this spirit that breathes through every 
 line of Henley, and with which the poetry 
 of Rudyard Kipling is so charged and sur- 
 charged that if I once began quoting from 
 him I know not where I should stop. 
 
 "He that shall endure to the end, the 
 same shall be saved." This is one of the 
 great spiritual lessons of the militant 
 school of poetry. And side by side with 
 this there is another lesson, or group of 
 lessons, equally important : the lesson of 
 tolerance and of reverence. 
 
 If a man works out his philosophy of 
 life by himself or with his books as his 
 only companions, it is hard for him to 
 
 106
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 avoid a good deal of injustice toward 
 people whose convictions are different 
 from his own. He may not always judge 
 the past as the man did who started with 
 the doctrine that whatever is is right, and 
 drew the conclusion that whatever was was 
 wrong. Nor will he always go to the same 
 lengths as the Presbyterian divine who 
 published a book in which he summarized 
 the result of his reasonings under the title 
 "The Final Philosophy." But the mode 
 in which he has arrived at his convictions 
 will make it, to say the least, very difficult 
 for him to understand how any man of 
 sense and honesty could ever have arrived 
 at different ones. The man who has really 
 had the chance to compare his views with 
 other men's views will look at things in a 
 broader way. Though his own feelings 
 may be intense, he will know that other 
 men are equally honest when they hold 
 other views and feel other emotions. The 
 
 107
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 very fact that he is willing to put his ideas 
 to the test of conflict means that he is 
 ready to give fair play to other men's 
 ideas. If the things which were of use to 
 a past generation are different from those 
 that he thinks the present needs, he does 
 not on that account despise them or brand 
 them as fictions. If he is a man of any 
 largeness of vision, he sees that the phi- 
 losophy of the future will grow beyond 
 what the present can conceive, just as the 
 best conceptions of the present have grown 
 beyond the possibilities of the past. He 
 is content to let each man get at the right 
 in his own way and use the forms of 
 thought which help him most. What 
 matter is it if MacAndrew's God be the 
 result of a mixture of Calvinistic theology 
 with the principles of steam engineering, 
 while the Lama's God is the result of 
 lonely meditation among the snow moun- 
 tains concerning impossible stories of 
 
 108
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 Buddha? If God under these forms, or 
 any other forms, can make engineers like 
 MacAndrew and priests like the Lama 
 and help them to know, as each knew in 
 his way, the real sizes and values of the 
 different parts of life, let us accept the 
 result and be thankful that men have 
 reached it by the roads that best suited 
 their several feet. 
 
 " How can I turn from any fire 
 On any man's hearthstone? 
 I know the longing and desire 
 That went to build my own !" 
 
 A tolerance like this has nothing in 
 common with the indifference of the man 
 who plays with his convictions. It repre- 
 sents rather the seriousness of the man 
 who values the essential part of his faith 
 all the more because he feels how much 
 greater is the reality for which he is 
 striving than the imperfect representation 
 
 109
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 of it which he already has achieved. For 
 the poet of today, like the Hebrew poets 
 of old, is essentially a prophet — the bearer 
 of a progressive revelation; one of a his- 
 toric chain of seers, feeling after God if 
 haply they may find him, and each in his 
 own way bringing men a little nearer to 
 the truth. 
 
 " When I was a king and a mason, a master 
 
 proven and skilled, 
 I planned to build me a palace such as a king 
 
 should build. 
 I decreed and dug down to my levels; and, 
 
 buried under the silt, 
 I came on the wreck of a palace such as a king 
 
 had built. 
 
 *' There was no wit in the fashion, there was no 
 
 worth in the plan ; 
 Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings 
 
 ran; 
 Masonry brute, mishandled, yet graven on 
 
 every stone 
 'After me cometh a builder; tell him, I too 
 
 have known.' 
 
 no
 
 RECENT POETRY 
 
 " Swift to my use in the trenches where my well- 
 planned groundworks grew 
 
 I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, I cut and 
 reset them anew. 
 
 Lime I had from his marbles, burned it, slaked 
 it, and spread, 
 
 Taking or leaving at pleasure the gifts of the 
 humble dead. 
 
 " Yet I despised not or gloried ; yet as we 
 wrenched them apart 
 I read in the razed foundations the heart of 
 
 that builder's heart. 
 As he had risen and pleaded, so did I under- 
 stand 
 The form of the dream he had followed by the 
 face of the thing he had planned. 
 
 " When I was a king and a mason, in the open 
 
 noon of my pride 
 They sent me a word from the darkness ; they 
 
 whispered and called me aside. 
 They said, 'The end is forbidden' ; they said, 
 
 'Thy use is fulfilled ; 
 Thy work shall be as the other's, the spoil of a 
 
 king that shall build.' 
 
 Ill
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 " I called my men from my trenches, my quar- 
 ries, my wharves, and my sheers ; 
 
 All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of 
 the faithless years; 
 
 Only I carved on the timber, only I wrought 
 in the stone 
 
 After me cometh a builder. Tell him, I too 
 have known/" 
 
 112
 
 APPENDIX I 
 
 ON THE MEANING OF THE TERM 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 WHEN these lectures were delivered 
 I was asked by two or three per- 
 sons what the word philosophy really 
 meant. This is a much easier question to 
 ask than to answer. A study of the 
 definitions and the illustrative passages 
 given in the Oxford Dictionary leads one 
 to the conclusion that the English word 
 philosophy can be used in as many different 
 senses as Mark Twain found for the 
 elusive German word Zti^; which, as he 
 truthfully remarked, could mean anything 
 from a bank check to a railroad train. 
 Under such circumstances each man may, 
 within certain broad limits, choose his own 
 definition. A philosophy, as I understand 
 
 113
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 It, Is a set of working hypotheses which a 
 man adopts In order to harmonize, as 
 far as may be, his prejudices with his 
 experience. 
 
 There are certain ideas or prejudices 
 which we accept without proof and take 
 as starting points in our own reasoning. 
 It is in this manner that we assume our 
 own existence, the existence of other 
 people like ourselves, the reaHty of an 
 external world of some kind, and an under- 
 lying orderliness in the events of that 
 world. None of these things is capable 
 of proof, in the ordinary sense of the 
 term. The Cog'ito ergo sum of Descartes 
 does not represent the real reason for 
 believing In a man's own existence. It is 
 simply a means of making a belief which 
 we already possess appear logically plau- 
 sible. I know of no better name by which 
 to call these assumptions than the old and 
 
 somewhat abused term Innate ideas. They 
 
 114
 
 MEANING OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 are based on inherited habits of action and 
 thought, which have lasted throughout so 
 many generations that they have become 
 unconscious if not instinctive. They repre- 
 sent prejudices rather than reasoned judg- 
 ments regarding the universe; and they 
 exempHfy in a striking degree that supe- 
 riority of prejudice over reason which 
 Burke so cogently set forth. 
 
 Side by side with these innate ideas or 
 prejudices there gradually come into our 
 lives other ideas which we acquire con- 
 sciously as the result of teaching and 
 observation. Our own experience of 
 everyday life and the truths of history 
 and science which we learn from others 
 supplement our preconceived notions of 
 the universe, and as we grow older begin 
 to conflict with them. Out of this conflict 
 comes a readjustment of our prejudices. 
 No man, however strong his innate ideas, 
 holds them in quite the same form at thirty 
 
 115
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 that he did at fifteen. But though men 
 modify their preconceptions they never 
 reject them. However much a man may 
 become imbued with the facts of physics, 
 he puts them in a framework of meta- 
 physics of his own. 
 
 What holds true of an individual holds 
 true of a community. A tribe starts with 
 certain underlying ideas regarding the uni- 
 verse, usually expressed in the form of a 
 rehgious creed. As the tribe grows into 
 a nation its beliefs are modified by the 
 events with which it comes in contact and 
 its creeds are readjusted in the light of 
 experience. The generation of Aeschylus 
 had learned some things which prevented 
 the creed of Homer from satisfying it. 
 The generation of Aristotle had learned 
 some things which prevented the creed of 
 Aeschylus from satisfying it. There is a 
 constant change in the kind of philosophy 
 that meets a people's demands. The popu- 
 
 116
 
 MEANING OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 lar belief and prejudice of early times is 
 like the system of the universe which 
 presents itself to the mind of a child — 
 based much on dreams and little on facts. 
 The fully developed philosophy of a later 
 day has discarded part, but never the 
 whole, of the dream. 
 
 The attempt to get a system of work- 
 ing hypotheses which shall satisfy our 
 instincts without conflicting with our expe- 
 rience is the most difficult problem which 
 logic presents. For we are not trying to 
 compare the validity of two similar kinds 
 of proof, or even the results of two dif- 
 ferent kinds of evidence. We are adjust- 
 ing a set of formulas derived from the 
 inherited experience of the race to the 
 limitations set by the acquired experience 
 of the individual. The process of achiev- 
 ing this result is philosophy. The result, 
 when we get it, is a philosophy — good or 
 bad, as the case may be. 
 
 117
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 It has become a habit in modern times, 
 particularly in the United States, to use 
 the word philosophy in a somewhat nar- 
 rower sense; to treat it as a branch of 
 psychology, or as being at any rate subject- 
 matter for the professed psychologist 
 rather than for the man of letters or man 
 of affairs. It is quite admissible to use 
 the term in this sense if we so desire. 
 Every event is essentially an impression 
 made upon us by something external to 
 ourselves. The study of the external 
 world is the work of physical science. The 
 study of the impressions we are receiving 
 from that world constitutes an important 
 part of the work of psychology. There is 
 a tendency to confine the name philosophy 
 to the conclusions derived from this study 
 of mental impressions; and that tendency 
 has acquired much force at the present 
 day because two or three eminent psycholo- 
 gists, notably Herbert Spencer and Wil- 
 lis
 
 MEANLNG OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Ham James, have developed brilliant phi- 
 losophies of life which are based upon the 
 study of psychology and which ignore, if 
 they do not defy, the dictates of logical 
 convention. But the majority of men who 
 have helped to formulate the thought of 
 the world regarding the relation between 
 its instincts and its experience have been 
 logicians rather than psychologists. The 
 great names in the history of phi- 
 losophy during past ages — Plato, Aristotle, 
 Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant — have 
 all been primarily logicians. Their work 
 as psychologists has been incidental. With 
 one or two, like Plato or perhaps Spinoza, 
 psychology has been a highly important 
 and useful incident of their studies; with 
 the others it has been a secondary, or even 
 (as in the case of Descartes) a somewhat 
 detrimental incident. 
 
 We shall, I believe, get a truer concep- 
 tion of the work of the philosophic think- 
 
 119
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 ers of the past If we regard the problem 
 as a logical Instead of a psychological 
 one — based on a study of evidence rather 
 than on a study of mental processes. 
 
 120
 
 APPENDIX II 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF CHARLES DAR- 
 WIN ON HISTORICAL AND 
 POLITICAL SCIENCE 
 
 ^ I ^HE theories of Charles Darwin 
 ■^ found readier and prompter accept- 
 ance among historians than among biolo- 
 gists. 
 
 When Darwin presented the doctrine 
 of natural selection to the zoologists and 
 botanists he was confronting them with a 
 new set of scientific ideas and conceptions. 
 His contemporaries were reluctant to 
 accept these new ideas. They had been 
 brought up to regard different species as 
 having been created independently. The 
 idea that types could be modified by slow 
 process of change was something foreign 
 to their minds. The idea that existing 
 
 121
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 types simply represented the result of suc- 
 cessful experiment in a field where the 
 unsuccessful experiments had been elimi- 
 nated by death was still more novel and 
 repugnant. It was not until the genera- 
 tion after Darwin that his fellow biologists 
 as a class were ready to abandon the idea 
 of special acts of creation for specific pur- 
 poses and to search instead for the slow 
 operation of natural causes. 
 
 In history and in politics the case was 
 different. All students of history accepted 
 the idea of evolution in their own field of 
 special study; most of them regarded his- 
 torical evolution as the result of a process 
 of natural selection. 
 
 Without an underlying idea of evolu- 
 tion human history is a meaningless chron- 
 icle, unworthy of the attention of intelli- 
 gent men. If different historical events 
 were independent of one another there 
 would be no sense in writing history at all. 
 
 122
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 All serious investigators in this field, from 
 Thucydides and Aristotle down to the 
 present time, have sought either to develop 
 the details of this orderly and gradual 
 evolution or to lay down the principles of 
 its operation. The man who today reads 
 the Politics of Aristotle for the first time 
 will be struck by the prevalence of methods 
 of thought which many biologists suppose 
 Darwin to have invented. And the same 
 idea of evolution thus used by Aristotle has 
 been applied in varying forms by all who 
 sought to develop a philosophy of his- 
 tory — by Hegel and his followers in Ger- 
 many or by men of the type of Henry 
 Thomas Buckle in England. 
 
 Not only was the idea of evolution thus 
 familiar to the historians; the idea of nat- 
 ural selection was also prominent in the 
 minds of many of them. The whole doc- 
 trine of John Stuart Mill concerning lib- 
 erty was founded upon reliance on a 
 
 123
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 process of natural selection. Look for 
 your hero in all possible directions, he said, 
 and you get the best chance of finding him. 
 The issue between Mill and Carlyle re- 
 minds one of the controversies between 
 Darwinian and anti-Darwinian in the field 
 of biology. Carlyle believed in the special 
 creation of a number of individual heroes; 
 Mill, together with nearly all scientifically 
 trained historians, believed in the evolution 
 of heroes by natural selection. 
 
 The conception of economic or political 
 conflict as a means of determining the sur- 
 vival of the fittest was seen perhaps even 
 more conspicuously in Malthus's theory of 
 population — a theory which Darwin him- 
 self regarded as having in some respects 
 foreshadowed his own work. Malthus 
 based his whole treatment of political 
 economy upon the doctrine that population 
 tended to outrun subsistence; that the 
 struggle for existence was a constant pro- 
 
 124
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 cess of elimination of the weak; and that 
 any attempt to interfere with this process 
 resulted rather in the deterioration than 
 in the improvement of the peoples that it 
 was designed to benefit. 
 
 If then the idea of evolution had been 
 a fundamental one in historical and politi- 
 cal science for more than two thousand 
 years, and if the idea of elimination by 
 natural selection was by no means unfa- 
 miliar to political thinkers, what was there 
 left for the followers of Darwin to do in 
 this field? 
 
 They found at least two things to do. 
 In the first place, they showed how natural 
 selection was a means of developing, not 
 only individuals of superior ability or intel- 
 ligence, but types of superior adaptation 
 to their surroundings; and they taught us 
 further to regard this adaptation of the 
 type to its surroundings as the thing which 
 gave it its right to exist. 
 
 125
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 The first of these points is well illus- 
 trated by the history of the Malthusian 
 theory before and after Darwin. Malthus 
 and almost all the Malthusians before the 
 time of Darwin talked of an actual struggle 
 for food between different individuals. 
 They thought that there was not enough 
 food to go round, and that this fact was a 
 direct means of keeping workers up to a 
 certain standard of efficiency and prudence 
 by the direct elimination of the weak. 
 Today we see that the result is far more 
 indirect than this. There is, in civilized 
 communities at least, no habitual scarcity 
 of food. This has been avoided by the 
 development of certain institutions like the 
 family and private property and certain 
 motives which go with those institutions 
 which prevent the scarcity that would 
 otherwise exist. A generation ago the 
 critics of Malthus thought that the non- 
 existence of the scarcity disproved the 
 
 126
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 Malthuslan theory. Today we see that It 
 confirms it. It shows that the type has 
 adapted itself to its environment. 
 
 It is the institution even more than the 
 man that has been marked out for survival 
 by the process of natural selection. We 
 have known for generations how elimina- 
 tion affected the development of indi- 
 viduals. It was Darwin who taught us to 
 account in this way for the growth of 
 species — in history as well as in biology. 
 And in thus accounting for the origin and 
 growth of institutions, he furnished for the 
 first time an objective justification of the 
 ethical standards and motives by which 
 those institutions were upheld. Every 
 prominent political thinker before Darwin, 
 with the one notable exception of Edmund 
 Burke, referred historical events to some 
 preconceived ethical standard of his own, 
 and judged them to be good or bad accord- 
 ing as they conformed to his preconceived 
 
 127
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 ideas. This is true even of a man like 
 John Stuart Mill. He had great natural 
 love of liberty, and was essentially tolerant 
 in his disposition. Yet one can feel in all 
 his work the underlying assumption that 
 the chief reason for approving of liberty 
 is its effect in developing the type of char- 
 acter represented by the liberal and toler- 
 ant Englishman of the nineteenth century. 
 This attitude of mind was a great help 
 to Mill in arranging a coherent system of 
 political economy; and as long as he ad- 
 dressed an audience whose general views 
 and general standards were like his own, 
 it enabled him to appeal to them with great 
 force. But the instant he was brought face 
 to face with a protectionist like Carey or 
 a socialist like Lassalle, what had pre- 
 viously been an element of strength became 
 an element of weakness. There was no 
 common ground from which to reason, 
 and no means of finding any. It was 
 
 128
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 Darwin who furnished the common 
 ground. It was Darwin who gave the 
 historians and poHtlcal thinkers the pos- 
 slblHty of reaching objective results from 
 their discussion which were previously 
 unattainable. You like one kind of man 
 and one kind of institution; I like another 
 kind of man or another kind of institution. 
 Very well; let us set to work to discover 
 which, in the long run, Is going to prevail 
 over the other. That which will prevail 
 in the long run must be right. This Is for 
 the historian the center and gist of Dar- 
 winism. We all assumed that orderly 
 evolution existed; we most of us under- 
 stood a good deal about a process of nat- 
 ural selection which was going on. But 
 none of us until Darwin came had learned 
 to take the results of natural selection as a 
 standard; to make the fact of permanence 
 the test of the right to remain; to assume 
 the view of the philosophical pragmatlst 
 
 129
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 in dealing with the problems that came 
 before us. 
 
 Of course this is a doctrine that needs 
 to be appHed with great care. The frank 
 acceptance of survival as a test of right is 
 attended with the danger that we may 
 take too short periods of history under 
 our observation, and may think that an 
 idea or an institution has won the race 
 when it is riding most hurriedly toward its 
 downfall. But in spite of all these dan- 
 gers, the necessity of applying the survival 
 test compels the man who is naturally 
 dogmatic to be somewhat less so, and helps 
 the man who is naturally objective to be 
 somewhat more so. It is a restraint upon 
 the man who does not want to have to 
 prove his points; it is an assistance to the 
 man who does. 
 
 This change in modes of thought and 
 criteria of ethics did not come suddenly. 
 It was far easier for popular writers to 
 
 130
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 seize upon certain results of Darwin's 
 thinking and try to apply them to history 
 in the form of rhetorical analogies than 
 it was to get at the Darwinian habit of 
 mind in dealing with historical problems 
 in general. Herbert Spencer's writings 
 furnish a very marked instance of this 
 error. Spencer's style was so felicitous 
 and his works were so widely read that he 
 did a good deal to retard the application 
 of the really important results of Darwin's 
 work to political thinking. Spencer and 
 his followers made much of the conception 
 of society as an organism; but they over- 
 looked the fact that historians had been 
 treating society as an organism for more 
 than two thousand years. In the belief 
 that they had occupied a new field, they 
 permitted themselves to employ a number 
 of loose analogies, in total ignorance of 
 the fact that competent observers had 
 already gone over much of the ground by 
 
 131
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 scientific methods. Historians had been 
 proving which forms of social Ufe did 
 survive; and this proof, defective or un- 
 certain as it was in many instances, was 
 yet better than the guesses of the Spen- 
 cerian, on the basis of remote analogy, as 
 to which forms of social life were going 
 to survive. When Spencer pronounced 
 evolution good or bad according as it did 
 or did not "proceed from an incoherent 
 indefinite homogeneity to a coherent defi- 
 nite heterogeneity," he was writing down 
 in large letters the fact that he was born 
 a good while before The Origin of Species 
 had appeared. He had put on a few of 
 the external attributes of the modern 
 biologist; that was all. The hands were 
 the hands of Esau, but the voice was the 
 voice of Jacob. Or, to take an instance 
 from a different field: when W. K. Clifford, 
 in his now almost forgotten Lectures and 
 Essays, proclaimed the right and duty of 
 
 132
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 the unlimited exercise of private judgment, 
 and called down anathemas on the head 
 of every man who wished to exercise his 
 own private judgment to the extent of dif- 
 fering from Mr. W. K. Clifford in this 
 particular, he simply showed that he lived 
 too early to have felt the full effect of The 
 Origin of Species in leading people to 
 substitute objective criteria for subjective 
 ones. 
 
 But it would perhaps be more to the pur- 
 pose to give instances of writers who were 
 influenced by Darwin, instead of those who 
 were not. 
 
 Among English economists, the man 
 who was quicl<:est to feel the force of the 
 new movement was Walter Bagehot. 
 Bagehot's Darwinian ideas are popularly 
 known from his Physics and Politics — an 
 interesting and often exceedingly brilliant 
 set of conjectures regarding the operation 
 of survival in prehistoric periods. But 
 
 133
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 Bagehot's main work and main interest 
 were always in the nearer parts of history, 
 and particularly economic history, rather 
 than the remoter parts. He it was who, 
 in an age when England still followed John 
 Stuart Mill blindly, first questioned the 
 general admissibility of Mill's assump- 
 tions. In these twentieth century days, 
 when competition is regarded, not as an 
 axiom or postulate of political economy, 
 but simply as an important incident in its 
 development, it is difficult for us to under- 
 stand the courage that was involved forty 
 years ago in publishing two critical essays 
 in which competition was regarded, not as 
 a standard to which all things must con- 
 form, but as one among several alternative 
 phases or modes of social service, whose 
 relative claims were to be Investigated and 
 relative merits judged by their applicability 
 to given conditions. In this mental atti- 
 tude the English writer who has followed 
 
 134
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 Bagehot most closely is W. J. Ashley, 
 whose English Economic History may be 
 taken as furnishing a clear exemplification 
 of Darwin's influence upon the methods 
 of modern economic thought. 
 
 Meantime a German investigator In 
 economics, Adolph Wagner of Berlin, had 
 been taking up Darwinian methods on a 
 larger scale and applying them with con- 
 spicuous success. Wagner may be said to 
 have developed his Darwinism at the oppo- 
 site end from Bagehot. Bagehot had been 
 brought up in the methods of the deductive 
 school of economics, and was impressed 
 with their inapplicability; Wagner had 
 been accustomed to the methods of the 
 historical school of economics, and was 
 impressed with their inconclusiveness. 
 While Bagehot wanted to make his analy- 
 sis broad enough to fit different kinds of 
 facts, Wagner was concerned to make his 
 synthesis coherent enough to bring him to 
 
 135
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 some positive proofs and conclusions. 
 Wagner's treatment of the theory of 
 property right Is a good example of his 
 philosophical method. He rejects both 
 the crude juristic theory that property 
 right is based upon occupancy and the 
 equally crude philosophic theory that It 
 ought to be based on labor. Society has 
 established property right because It has 
 shown Itself the best motive — in fact, 
 apparently the necessary motive — In order 
 to get industry well and efficiently man- 
 aged. It Is only by the application of this 
 last theory that you can make a connection 
 between what Is and what ought to be; 
 between your history and economics on the 
 one hand and your law and ethics on the 
 other. If the philosopher says that prop- 
 erty ought to be based upon labor, the 
 jurist can laugh at him. If the jurist says 
 that property is based upon occupancy or 
 upon the constitution of society, the phl- 
 
 136
 
 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 losopher can say that the occupants are bad 
 men and that the sooner society changes 
 its constitution the better. But if property 
 is an institution which has survived while 
 other forms of social organization have 
 failed, because property preserves nations 
 and socialism destroys them, then socialism 
 is disproved by the logic of events — the 
 logic that Darwin has taught us to apply 
 to problems of this kind. 
 
 It is, however, not so much in its special 
 applications that the Darwinian theory has 
 affected modern political science as in the 
 general habit of mind which it has fostered 
 and cultivated. It has not led to many 
 great discoveries which can be set apart 
 from the general run of facts previously 
 known; but it has led to changes in the 
 methods of judgment which enable us to 
 understand and use all historical facts in 
 a more objective way. 
 
 A few years ago, when Dr. Jowett was 
 
 137
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 master of Balliol, there was a discussion 
 concerning two men who had attained high 
 position at an early age. One of them had 
 become a bishop, the other a judge ; and 
 the conversation turned on the respective 
 merits of the two careers. One of the dons 
 said: "I prefer the bishop. The judge can 
 only say, 'You be hanged' ; the bishop can 
 say, 'You be damned.' " "Yes," said Dr. 
 Jowett, sententiously, "but when the judge 
 says, 'You be hanged,' you are hanged^ 
 The influence of Charles Darwin on his- 
 torical and political thought may be 
 summed up by saying that he has made our 
 historians cease to aspire to be bishops 
 and content themselves with the more 
 modest but also more effective position of 
 judges. For broad principles of judgment 
 which they could not apply effectively they 
 have substituted narrower but clearer ones 
 whose application can be made evident to 
 their fellow men. 
 
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 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 I have spoken of this attitude of mind 
 as having been foreshadowed in the works 
 of Edmund Burke. To him, as to the 
 modern thinker, human history was the 
 record of a process of ehmlnation and sur- 
 vival. To him poHtlcal institutions and 
 poHtlcal ideas had grown up as a means 
 of preserving the race that held them. 
 And to him also it was unwarrantable to 
 attempt to tear down on a priori grounds 
 beliefs and methods that had preserved 
 the race that held them, unless you were 
 able to substitute something practically 
 better In their place. A thing did not 
 seem to him correct which was logically 
 good and practically bad. He suspected 
 a defect in the logic. Was he right or 
 wrong? In the first half of the nineteenth 
 century the majority of men would have 
 said that he was from a theoretical stand- 
 point wrong. They admired his insight 
 into the political conditions of his day, but 
 
 139
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 they would have none of his theories. 
 Today the world feels a little less sure 
 about some of his individual judgments 
 than it did at the time when they were 
 uttered; but as a matter of theory it has 
 accepted his method as a sound one. It is 
 in general prepared to make survival a 
 test of right. 
 
 This is Darwin's contribution to politi- 
 cal science; and the completeness with 
 which this contribution is accepted is shown 
 by the sudden cessation of public interest 
 in books which do not apply or accept that 
 test. Students of politics no longer read 
 either Hegel or Comte. Buckle's History 
 of^ Civilization, which in the years imme- 
 diately following its appearance had a 
 greater success than Darwin's Origin of 
 Species, is now known only to a few spe- 
 cialists in English literature. Mill's Prin- 
 ciples of Political Economy is valued for 
 its contributions to the theory of banking; 
 
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 INFLUENCE OF DARWIN 
 
 but as a work of political philosophy it has 
 lost the place which its author, modest 
 man though he was, confidently claimed 
 for it. 
 
 We can get a curious idea of the kind of 
 change which has taken place by compar- 
 ing two works which are closely akin, by 
 two men who were closely associated — 
 Mill on Liberty and Morley on Com- 
 promise. The two writers deal with 
 nearly the same topic. They approach it 
 with nearly the same prepossessions. They 
 arrive at almost exactly the same practical 
 conclusions. Yet Morley is read today, 
 and Mill, speaking broadly, is not. Why? 
 Because Mill is constantly referring things 
 to a subjective standard, and Morley to an 
 objective one. Mill's whole argument is 
 essentially an argumentum ad hominem, 
 even when It takes the form of an appeal 
 to experience; Morley's an appeal to expe- 
 
 141
 
 INFLUENCES IN MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 rience, even when it takes the form of an 
 argnmentum ad hominem. 
 
 We may not be any more correct In our 
 political reasoning than our fathers. I 
 dare say that when the world contrasts the 
 political philosophy of today with that of 
 a generation or two ago It will reprove us 
 for our crude judgments and for the 
 irreverence with which we have cast aside 
 work that was better than our own because 
 it did not reach Its results by our methods. 
 But we are at least trying as no previous 
 generation has tried to get objective stand- 
 ards on which different men and different 
 ages can agree; and for this effort, and 
 for whatever measure of success it has 
 attained, we may thank Charles Darwin. 
 
 142
 
 INDEX 
 
 Annunzio, Gabriele d' 99, 100 
 
 Aristotle, theory of evolution 123 
 
 Armies, standing 60, 61 
 
 Ashley, W. J 135 
 
 Bagehot, Walter 32, 133-135 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy 47, 48 
 
 Bergson, Henri 69 
 
 Bichat, M. F. X 26 
 
 Biology, development of 25-27 
 
 Bismarck 57-60 
 
 Blake, William 82-84 
 
 Browning, Robert, 90-97; contrasted with William 
 
 Blake, 92, 93 ; with Bernard Shaw, 93, 94. 
 Burke, Edmund, 139; on prejudice, 75, 76. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas 64, 123, 124 
 
 Cell theory 25-27 
 
 Civilization, ethical character of 33 
 
 Clifford, W. K 132, 133 
 
 Code Napoleon 44, 45 
 
 Common sense philosophy 16 
 
 Comte, Auguste 22, 34, 35 
 
 Conservation of energy 23-25 
 
 Copernicus 37 
 
 Creeds, 3; history of, 116, 117. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 28-39; influence of, 121-142. 
 
 Darwinism and theism 36 
 
 Dunoyer, Charles 11 
 
 Economics and Darwinian theory 133-138 
 
 Education, true meaning of 1-3 
 
 Energy, conservation of 23-25 
 
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 INDEX 
 
 Equality in French Revolution 41-42 
 
 Equality, workings of 43-46 
 
 Ethics as affected by Darwinian theory 129-133 
 
 Evolution, distinguished from natural selection, 
 
 28; historical, 122, 123. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin 20 
 
 Fraternity in French Revolution 42, 43 
 
 Fraternity, sentiment of 46, 47 
 
 Gamaliel, philosophy of 70 
 
 Goethe 85-87 
 
 Hegel 54, 123 
 
 Henley, W. E 80, 82 
 
 Historical school of economics 135, 136 
 
 Holy Alliance 46, 47 
 
 Huxley and the Christian church 4 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik 103 
 
 Individualism in morals 62-64 
 
 Individualism, rise of, 47-53; decline of, 53-61. 
 
 Innate ideas 114-116 
 
 Instinct 73, 74 
 
 Institutions, early history of 126, 127 
 
 James, William 69, 73, 118, 119 
 
 Jowett, J. H 137, 138 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard 105, 106, 108-112 
 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand 58 
 
 Liberty of thought in Europe 15 
 
 Liberty in French Revolution, 40, 41 ; French and 
 
 English contrasted, 53, 54; theory of, 64, 65. 
 
 Loria, A 67 
 
 Macaulay 12, 13 
 
 Malthus, T. R 124-127 
 
 xMarx, Karl 55, 56, 58 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 14, 65, 123, 124, 141; strength 
 
 and weakness of, 127, 128. 
 Militarism 60-62 
 
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 INDEX 
 
 Morley, John, 65; tolerance, basis of, 65; in 
 
 modern literature, 106-112, 141. 
 
 Mysticism 78 
 
 Napoleon on equality 45, 46 
 
 Napoleonic code 44, 45 
 
 National unity 56, 57 
 
 Nationalism 58-62 
 
 Natural selection, 28-36; in human history, 124- 
 
 130; in modern literature, 98, 99; in politics, 
 
 31, 32; in ethics, 32-34; versus special creation, 
 
 121, 122. 
 
 Newman, J. H 89, 90 
 
 Nietzsche, Friedrich 66-68, 72, 87 
 
 Over-specialization 2 
 
 Philosophy, meaning of, 113-117; relations to logic 
 
 and psychology, 118-120. 
 
 Physiology contrasted with morphology 27 
 
 Plutarch 9 
 
 Political economy and Darwinian theory 133-138 
 
 Political thought, successive stages 40 
 
 Population, Malthus's principle of 124, 127 
 
 Pragmatism 69-74 
 
 Prejudice, 114-117; Burke on, 75, 76. 
 
 Property right, theory of 136, 137 
 
 Protective tariffs 59-60 
 
 Rational egoism 63 
 
 Reasoning, tentative character of 73, 74 
 
 Religious feeling, changes in 77-82 
 
 Revolution, French, effect on English poetry, 88, 
 
 89; ideals of, 40-43. 
 
 Revolution of 1848 56 
 
 Rousseau 84, 85 
 
 Rumf ord 23 
 
 Ruskin, John 89, 90 
 
 Schiller 85, 87 
 
 145
 
 INDEX 
 
 Schwann, Theodor 26 
 
 Science, modern, development of 18-34 
 
 Scott, Walter 88 
 
 Shaw, Bernard 84, 93, 94, 102-104 
 
 Silliman, Benjamin 13, 14 
 
 Socialism, origin of name, 54; early history of, 
 
 54-56. 
 
 Specialized study 2 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 7, 8, 71, 72, 118, 119; fallacies of, 
 
 131, 132. 
 
 Storm and stress, period of 85, 86 
 
 Tariffs, protective , 59, 60 
 
 Tennyson 79-81, 82 
 
 Theism and Darwinism 36 
 
 Thermodynamics 24, 25 
 
 Types, development of, 125-127; origin of, 121, 
 
 122; selection of, 29, 30. 
 
 Wagner, Adolph 135-137 
 
 Wallace, Alfred Russell 28 
 
 Wolff, Caspar 26 
 
 Wordsworth, William 88 
 
 Young Hegelians 90 
 
 Zola, Emile 100, 101 
 
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