John Fiske

“ John Fiske died in Nineteen Hundred One, suddenly, aged fifty-nine. [Pg 428]
ext to the originator of a great thought is the man who quotes it," says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Next to the discoverer of a great scientific truth is the man who recognizes and upholds it. The service done science by Fiske is beyond calculation. Fiske was not a Columbus upon the sea of science: he followed the course laid out by others, and was really never out of sight of a buoy. He comes as near being a great scientist, perhaps, as any man that America has ever produced. ”

“ John Fiske maintains that mankind, during the previous bestial period, were compelled like all other animals to maraud and destroy, as a part of the plan of natural selection in securing the survival of the fittest; the victories of the strong over the weak were the steps and stages of the animal creation in its general advancement. And he further states that, even after man had entered upon the heritage of his manhood, it was still for a time the true end of his being to maraud as before and to despoil all men whose weakness placed them in his power. ”

“ John Fiske believed that we live in a natural universe, and that God works through Nature, and that, in fact, Nature is the spirit of God at work.
Doubts never disturbed John Fiske. Things that were not true technically and literally were true to him if taken in a spiritual or poetic way. God, to him, was a personal being, creating through the Law of Evolution because He chose to. The six days of Creation were six eons or geological periods.
No man has ever been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John Fiske. ”

“ John Fiske affirms the reality of religion. He argues that the progress of life has been achieved through adjustment to external realities; that the religious idea has played a dominant part in history; that all the analogies of evolution show that man’s religious nature cannot be an adjustment to an external non-reality. He says: “Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion.” ”

“ Happy, thrice happy, those who [94] have traversed all life's pathway and come at last to the hour when they stand face to face with themselves, then to find therein a divine image like unto the comeliness and completion of Him whose face was transfigured and shone as the light.
At length has dawned the day when science strengthens the argument for immortality. The dream of the prophet and seer is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge. "Each new discovery," says John Fiske, "but places man upon a higher pinnacle than ever, and lights the future with the radiant color of hope." ”

“ His name was originally Edmund Fiske Green, but in 1855 he took the name of a great-grandfather, John Fiske. His boyhood was spent with a grandmother in Middletown, Connecticut; and prior to his entering college he had read widely in English literature and history, had surpassed most boys in the extent of his Greek and Latin work, and had studied several modern languages. He graduated at Harvard in 1863, continuing to study languages and philosophy with zeal; spent two years in the Harvard law school, and opened an office in Boston ”

“ For his knowledge of the history of human thinking assures him that such methods have through all past time proved barren of aught save strife, while his own bold yet humble method is the only one through which truth has ever been elicited. To pursue unflinchingly the methods of science requires dauntless courage and a faith that nothing can shake. Such courage and such loyalty to nature brings its own reward. ”

“ There are those who would explain away the human soul as a mere group of fleeting phenomena attendant upon the collocation of sundry particles of matter. And there are many others who, without committing themselves to these positions of the atheist and the materialist, have nevertheless come to regard religion as practically ruled out from human affairs. No religious creed that man has ever devised can be made to harmonize in all its features with modern knowledge. All such creeds were constructed with reference to theories of the universe which are now utterly and hopelessly discredited. ”

“ The news having reached us of the untimely death of John Fiske, once our professional associate, we, the American Library Association, desire to make record of our profound grief at the departure of a writer who was a dominant force in American literature, and to express our sense that in this passing of a great thinker, historian, and spiritual leader, our land and our time have sustained irreparable loss. ”

“ John Fiske's grandmother was his first teacher, and she started out with the assumption that genius always skips one generation. She believed that she was dealing with a record-breaker, and she was. What she did not know about the classics was known by others whom she delegated to teach her grandchild.
When her baby genius was just out of linsey-woolsey dresses and wore trousers buttoned to a calico waist, she began preparing him for college. The old lady had loved a college man in her youth, and she judged Harvard by the Harvard man she knew best. ”

“ From the standpoint of modern science John Fiske confirms the validity of such an argument; for what he affirms in regard to belief in the divine is equally applicable to this belief in a future life. “If the relation thus established in the morning twilight of man’s existence between the human soul and a world invisible and immaterial is a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the objective term is non-existent ”

“ Where you will be, I cannot faintly imagine, and neither churchmen nor philosophers help me, for the churchmen are too objective and the philosophers too abstract; the best I can do is to take John Fiske’s word for it, who knew far more about both science and metaphysics than I can hope to, when he says the materialistic theory that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body is “perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy.” ”

“ Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade.
Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true when rightly understood.
And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics.
To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything that is in the Universe is natural ”

“ The easy work of science is largely already done. Those who would continue investigation must study not only facts and structures, but the laws that govern them. In the words of John Fiske, “Whether plants or mountains or mollusks or subjunctive moods or tribal confederacies be the things studied, the scholars who have studied them most fruitfully were those who have studied them as phases of development. Their work has directed the current of thought.” The most difficult problems in life are susceptible of more or less perfect solution if approached by the method of evolution. ”

“ America has had but four men of unmistakable originality. These are: Franklin, Emerson, Whitman and Edison. Each worked in a field particularly his own, and the genius of each was recognized in Europe before we were willing to acknowledge it here. But the word "scientist" can hardly be properly applied to any of these men. For want of a better name we call John Fiske our greatest scientist. He was the most learned man of his day. In the realm of Physical Geography no American could approach him. ”

“ It is profoundly true that a theory of things may seem theistic or atheistic in virtue of what it says of Man, no less than in virtue of what it says of God. The craving for a final cause is so deeply rooted in human nature that no doctrine of theism which fails to satisfy it can seem other than lame and ineffective. In writing "Cosmic Philosophy" I fully realized this when, in the midst of the argument against Paley's form of theism, I said that "the process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest rudiments." ”

“ In dealing with the Infinite we are confessedly treating of that which transcends our powers of conception. Our ability to frame ideas is strictly limited by experience, and our experience does not furnish the materials for the idea of a personality which is not narrowly hemmed in by the inexorable barriers of circumstance. We therefore cannot conceive such an idea. But it does not follow that there is no reality answering to what such an idea would be if it could be conceived. The test of inconceivability is only applicable to the world of phenomena from which our experience is gathered. ”

“ She was inspired with the idea of making America in the high sense American and saw in the young genius a good ally. The chance was embraced and John Fiske after that dipped only fitfully into philosophical themes, writing, however, The Destiny of Man, The Idea of God, Cosmic Roots of Loveland Self-sacrifice, and Life Everlasting. He gave his main strength, to a thing worth while, the establishment in America of Anglo-Saxon freedom. ”

“ And often he discovered that the text which seemed to contradict science was really prophetic of it. John Fiske did not take anything away from anybody, unless he gave them something better in return.
"A man's belief is a part of the man," he said. "Take it away by force and he will bleed to death; but if the time comes when he no longer needs it, he will either slough it or convert it into something more useful."
Every good thing begins as something else. Evolution is at work on the creeds as well as in matter. A monkey-man will have a monkey belief. ”

“ What more feeble than the feebleness of the babe! And yet that multiplied by the million through aeons of time and over continents of space fashions humanity after the sublime pattern shown on the Mount. If to John Fiske belongs the credit of first recognising in the scheme of evolution the significance of this mighty factor, the extension of infancy (he himself so believed and I do not think it can be questioned that he was the first to recognise it) , what philosophic thinker has to a greater extent laid the world in debt? ”

“ For the creation of Man was by no means the creation of a perfect being. The most essential feature of Man is his improvableness, and since his first appearance on the earth the changes that have gone on in him have been enormous, though they have continued to run along in the lines of development that were then marked out. ”

“ UP to this point, however remote from ordinary every-day thoughts may be the region of speculation which we have been called upon to traverse, we have still kept within the limits of legitimate scientific hypothesis. Though we have ventured for a goodly distance into the unknown, we have not yet been required to abandon our base of operations in the known. Of the views presented in the preceding paper, some are wellnigh certainly established, some are probable, some have a sort of plausibility, others—to which we have refrained from giving assent—may possibly be true ”

“ At no time since men have dwelt upon the earth have their notions about the universe undergone so great a change as in the century of which we are now approaching the end. Never before has knowledge increased so rapidly; never before has philosophical speculation been so actively conducted, or its results so widely diffused. It is a characteristic of organic evolution that numerous progressive tendencies, for a long time inconspicuous, now and then unite to bring about a striking and apparently sudden change ”

“ To the behaviour of these external powers our actions must be adapted under penalty of death. And upon grounds no [Pg 63] less firm than those on which we believe in any externality whatever, we recognize that these forces antedated our birth and will endure after we have disappeared from the scene. No one supposes that he makes the world for himself, so that it is born and dies with him. Every one perforce contemplates the world as something existing independently of himself, as something into which he has come, and from which he is to go ”

“ Matter is but the generalized name we give to those modifications which we refer immediately to an unknown something outside of ourselves. It was long ago shown that all the qualities of matter are what the mind makes them, and have no existence as such apart from the mind. In the deepest sense all that we really know is mind, and as Clifford would say, what we call the material universe is simply an imperfect picture in our minds of a real universe of mind-stuff. [22] Our own mind we know directly; our neighbour's mind we know by inference ”

“ We must not look for absolute accuracy in a narrative which—as we have it—is not the work of (p. 179) Leif or Thorfinn or any of their comrades, but of compilers or copyists, honest and careful as it seems to me, but liable to misplace details and to call by wrong names things which they had never seen. Starting with these modest expectations we shall find the points of verisimilitude numerous. Ear-marks of truth in the narrative. To begin with the least significant, somewhere on our northeastern coast the voyagers found many foxes. ”