John Fiske

“ It was not strange that among the younger men whose opinions were moulded between 1830 and 1840 there should have been one of organizing genius, with a mind inexhaustibly fertile in suggestions, who should undertake to elaborate a general doctrine of evolution, to embrace in one grand coherent system of generalizations all the minor generalizations which workers in different departments of science were establishing. It is this prodigious work of construction that we owe to Herbert Spencer. ”

“ Parkman, on the other hand, conceives and presents his subject as a whole. He forgets nothing, overlooks nothing; but whether it is a bloody battle, or a theological pamphlet, or an exploring journey though the forest, or a code for the discipline of nunneries, each event grows out of its context as a feature in the total development that is going on before our eyes. It is only the historian who is also philosopher and artist that can thus deal in block with the great and complex life of a whole society. ”

“ Those plays were written, not to teach philosophy, but to fill the theatre and make money. They were written by a practised actor and manager, the most consummate master of dramatic effects that ever lived; a poet unsurpassed for fertility of invention, unequalled for melody of language, unapproached for delicacy of fancy, inexhaustible in humour, profoundest of moralists; a man who knew human nature by intuition, as Mozart knew counterpoint or as Chopin knew harmony. The name of that writer was none other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. ”

“ Impartiality, not only real, but conspicuous and unmistakable, is the prime requisite in a court of arbitration. Its life and health can be sustained only in an atmosphere of untainted and unsuspected integrity. But in an age which does not yet fully comprehend the damnable villainy of such maxims as "Our country, right or wrong," gross partisanship is not easy to eliminate from human nature. Even austere judges, taken from a Supreme Court, have sometimes shown themselves to be men of like passions with ourselves. ”

“ In an important sense, the age of Pontiac is far more remote from us than the age of Clovis or the age of Agamemnon. When barbaric society is overwhelmed by advancing waves of civilization, its vanishing is final; the thread of tradition is cut off forever with the shears of Fate. Where are Montezuma's Aztecs? Their physical offspring still dwell on the table-land of Mexico, and their ancient speech is still heard in the streets, but that old society is as extinct as the trilobites, and has to be painfully studied in fossil fragments of custom and tradition. ”

“ The history of modern physics—as in the case of the correlation of forces and the undulatory theory of light—furnishes us with many instances of wise thoughts floating like downy seeds in the atmosphere until the moment has come for them to take root. And so it has been with the greatest achievement of modern thinking,—the doctrine of evolution. Students and investigators in all departments, alike in the physical and in the historical sciences, were fairly driven by the nature of the phenomena before them into some hypothesis, more or less vague, of gradual and orderly change or development. ”

“ A million boys might be turned loose in Middlesex Fells, one after another, there to roam in solitude until our globe should have entered upon a new geological period, and the chances are against any one of them becoming a great historian, or anything else above mediocrity. But in Parkman, as in all men of genius, the dominant motive power was something within him, something which science has not data enough to explain. The divine spark of genius is something which we know only through the acts which it excites. ”

“ Here one is naturally led to the reflection that in that day of small things, as some might call it, there were spiritual influences operative at Harvard which more than made up for shortcomings in material equipment. There is a kind of human presence, all too rare in this world, which is in itself a stimulus and an education worth more than all the scholastic artifices that the wit of man has devised; for in the mere contact with it one's mind is trained and widened as if by enchantment. Such a human presence in Cambridge was Louis Agassiz. ”

“ As a crown to all this useful work, Youmans established, in 1872, "The Popular Science Monthly," which has unquestionably been of high educational value to the general public. It was not the aim of this magazine to give an account of every theory expounded, every fact observed, every discovery made, from year to year, whether significant or insignificant. The mind of the people is not educated by dumping a great unshapely mass of facts into it. It needs to be stimulated rather than crammed. Education in science should lead one to think for one's self. ”

“ From age to age, our knowledge is growing from more to more. From the discovery of America, from the astronomy of Copernicus and the physics of Galileo, down to the universal doctrine of evolution in our own time, there has been one grand coherent and consecutive tale of ever enlarging, ever more organized knowledge of the world in which we live. ”

“ All man's inventive faculty, all his patient inquisitiveness, all the courage he could summon, were forthwith called into play. The dreams of boundless riches, the eager thirst for new knowledge, the superhuman bravery, which characterized the epoch of maritime discovery, are symptoms that reveal to us the highly wrought condition of the European mind at the time. A study of contemporary chronicles and letters cannot fail to bring home to us the singular intensity with which the thrill of venturesome romance was felt in every fibre of man's being. ”

“ Among the men in America whose minds, between thirty and forty years ago, were feeling their way toward some such unified conception of nature as Mr. Spencer was about to set forth in all its dazzling glory,—among the men who were thus prepared to grasp the doctrine of evolution at once and expound it with fresh illustrations,—the first in the field was the man to whose memory we have met here this evening to pay a brief word of tribute. ”

“ For while it is true—though many people do not know it—that by no imaginable artifice can you make a society that is better than the human units you put into it, it is also true that nothing is easier than to make a society that is worse than its units. So it was with the colony of New France.
Nowhere can we find a description of despotic government more careful and thoughtful, or more graphic and lifelike, than Parkman has given us in his volume on "The Old Régime in Canada." Seldom, too, will one find a book fuller of political wisdom. ”

“ Great in his natural powers and great in the use he made of them, Parkman was no less great in his occasion and in his theme. Of all American historians he is the most deeply and peculiarly American, yet he is at the same time the broadest and most cosmopolitan. The book which depicts at once the social life of the Stone Age, and the victory of the English political ideal over the ideal which France inherited from imperial Rome, is a book for all mankind and for all time. The more adequately men's historic perspective gets adjusted, the greater will it seem. ”

“ But if Bacon was far from being a mean example of human nature, it is surely an exaggeration to call him the wisest and brightest of mankind. He was a scholar and critic of vast accomplishments, a writer of noble English prose, and a philosopher who represented rather than inaugurated a most beneficial revolution in the aims and methods of scientific inquiry. He is one of the real glories of English literature, but he is also one of the most overrated men of modern times. ”

“ The modern mind has taken a little draught, the prelude to deeper draughts, at the healing and purifying well of science; and it has begun to be dissatisfied with anything short of exact truth. When any unsound element enters into a narrative, the taint is quickly tasted, and its flavour spoils the whole.
We are then brought, I say, to the secret of Parkman's power. His Indians are true to the life. In his pages Pontiac is a man of warm flesh and blood, as much so as Montcalm or Israel Putnam. This solid reality in the Indians makes the whole work real and convincing. ”

“ Among the forefathers of the present civilized inhabitants of Europe are unmistakable traces of human sacrifices, and of the reckoning of kinship through the mother only. When we have come to survey large groups of facts of this sort, the conclusion is irresistibly driven home to us that the more advanced societies have gone through various stages now represented here and there by less advanced societies; that there is a general path of social development, along which, owing to special circumstances, some peoples have advanced a great way, some a less way, some but a very little way ”

“ The struggle between France and England for the soil of North America was one of the great critical moments in the career of mankind,—no less important than the struggle between Greece and Persia, or between Rome and Carthage. Out of the long and complicated interaction between Roman and Teutonic institutions which made up the history of the Middle Ages, two strongly contrasted forms of political society had grown up and acquired aggressive strength when in the course of the sixteenth century a New World beyond the sea was laid open for colonization. ”

“ When we look at the stupendous edifice of science that has been reared upon this basis, when we consider the almost limitless sweep of inorganic and organic chemistry, the myriad applications to the arts, the depth to which we have been enabled to penetrate into the innermost proclivities of matter, it seems almost incredible that a single century can have witnessed so much achievement. ”

“ So it was in that recent time when Henry V. of England was smiting the French chivalry at Agincourt, and his cousin Prince Henry of Portugal was beginning the search for an ocean route to the Indies. Never did the human mind get such a wrench out of its ancient grooves, never were such vistas of new possibilities laid open, never was beheld such glorious hardihood, such startling romance, as in the time when Columbus sailed westward to find the East, and Cortes met warriors of the Stone Age face to face. ”

“ The vast treasures of theory and example which he had accumulated were given to the world, the notion of special creations was exploded, and the facts of phylogenetic evolution won general acceptance.
Under the influence of this great achievement, men in every department of science began to work in a more philosophical spirit. Naturalists, abandoning the mood of the stamp collectors, saw in every nook and corner some fresh illustration of Darwin's views. ”

“ And when we join with all this his unfailing common sense, his broad and kindly view of men and things, and the delicious humour that kept flashing out in quaint, pithy phrases such as no other man would have thought of, and such as are the despair of any one trying to remember and quote them, we can seem to imagine what a power he must have been with his lectures.
When such a man goes about for seventeen years, teaching scientific truths for which the world is ripe, we may be sure that his work is great, albeit we have no standard whereby we can exactly measure it. ”

“ Freeman was very domestic in his habits. When not travelling, he was to be found in his country home, writing in his own library. When he was in the United States, it amused him to see people's surprise when told that he did not live in a city, and did not spend his time deciphering musty manuscripts in public libraries or archives. He used to say that, even in point of economy, he thought it better to dwell among pleasant green fields and to consult one's own books than to take long journeys or be stifled in dirty cities in order to consult other people's book. ”

“ When we sometimes ventured to observe that Spencer's work was as great as Newton's, and that his theory of evolution was going to remodel human thinking upon all subjects whatever, people used to stare at us and take us for idiots. Any one member of such a small community was easy to find; and I have always dated a new era in my life from the Sunday afternoon when Youmans came to my room in Cambridge. It was the beginning of a friendship such as hardly comes but once to a man. ”

“ It is because of this freedom that Shakespeare reaches a far wider public of readers and listeners than Milton or Dante, whose vast learning makes them in many places "caviare to the general." Book-lore is a great source of power, but one may easily be hampered by it. What we forever love in Homer is the freshness that comes with lack of it, and in this sort of freshness Shakespeare agrees with Homer far more than with the learned poets. ”

“ Situations will arise (if they have not already arisen) in which such moral weight as the United States can exert will be called for. The pacification of Europe, therefore, is not an affair that is foreign to our interests. In that, as in every other aspect of the Christian policy of "peace on earth and good will to men," we are most deeply concerned; and every incident, like the present Arbitration Treaty, that promises to advance us even by one step toward the sublime result, it is our solemn duty to welcome and encourage by all the means within our power. ”