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THE CENTENARY MOVEMENT 
 OF THOUGHT 
 
 An Address 
 
 Delivered before the Ohio State University 
 
 AT THE 
 
 Commencement held June 19, 1889 
 
 BY 
 
 JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN 
 
 Sage Professor of Philosophy in Cornell University 
 
 Pl'IlHSHED nV THE OhIO StATE UNIVERSITY 
 
 j COLUMBUS 
 

;V^7 
 
 THE 
 
 Centenary Movement of Thought. 
 
 The recent celebration of the inauguration of Washington 
 has brought to a close the series of centennial celebrations 
 which began thirteen years ago with the Declaration of 
 Independence. The commemorative ceremonies, spectacles, 
 and festivities, may sometimes have been unmeaning, and no 
 one will pretend they have not at times been marred by bad 
 taste. There is no movement without friction. And every 
 noble exertion may run by excess into its opposite. But, as 
 human affairs go, that man is surely not to be envied who has 
 failed to derive from these national commemorations matter for 
 edification and calm assurance. It is always a sign of healthy 
 life when a nation rehearses to itself and glorifies the noble 
 deeds which the fathers did in the days of old. In the ideal 
 there is life forever. And as I have seen the nation nourish its 
 spirit on the rich memories of its founders, and dedicate itself 
 anew to the divine ideas they sealed upon this continent with 
 their blood, I have felt that, hoWever serious, new, and perplexing 
 
 411281 
 
were the problems of modern life, a redeeming ardor from the 
 past would enter into the present, and the second century of the 
 Republic's existence be suffused with a glory overshadowing 
 even that of the first. 
 
 The institution of the centennial celebrations, and the 
 hearty manner in which they were observed, indicate that the 
 political instincts of the American people are sound and healthy. 
 But man is a rational as well as a political animal. And reason 
 is the crowning glory of the world. Above all things, therefore, 
 the movements of thought deserve frequent recollection and 
 examination. The tree of knowledge, like the tree of life, 
 draws its vitality from the generations that are past. We are 
 and shall be largely what the spiritual currents of the ages make 
 us. In this process freedom and necessity are at one. The 
 individual is moulded by the invisible but not less real spirit of 
 his race to issues in which he finds with joy the realization of 
 his highest self. Surely, then, nothing can more closely touch 
 us than the stirrings of that organism of thought and sentiment 
 in which our fathers and our fathers' fathers have lived and 
 moved and had their being. Children of the Zeitgeist we would 
 follow its movements over the century. As the survey is broad, 
 and the time short, we must not allow eddies and side currents 
 to draw us from the main channel, even though at times it 
 appears no deeper than the adjacent river-bed, or even loses 
 itself altogether in the sand. 
 
 The most obvious difference between the culture of to-day 
 and that of the early days of the Republic is a characteristic 
 
that renders the undertaking upon which I have perhaps rashly 
 ventured, all but impossible. " Many shall run to and fro, and 
 knowledge shall be increa.sed," said the prophet ; and our century 
 has been destined to fulfill the prediction. It is true that the 
 mediaeval endeavor to "shut up the words, and seal the book, 
 even to the time of the end " had collapsed as early as the 
 fifteenth century, when the infinite mystery and splendors of 
 the world broke upon the benighted spirit of the West as 
 centuries before they had lain reflected in the clear eye of the 
 all-seeing Greek. But Hellenic science had been for the most 
 part swallowed up of time ; and speculation reeled for want of 
 a solid basis. That in these circumstances the literature of 
 classic antiquity should have formed the staple of higher culture 
 in the sixteenth century was as natural and inevitable as its 
 pretensions in the nineteenth, after modern literature and 
 science had grown up, were anachronistic and absurd. The 
 seventeenth century forms an ever memorable epoch in the 
 history of mankind. It witnessed the triumph of the sublime 
 astronomical system of Copernicus and Galileo, a system which, 
 while it illustrated the might of human reason, was infinitely 
 humbling to human pride. With the geocentric theory fell the 
 venerable belief that the children of earth were the final object 
 of creation. It was reserved for Darwin to determine man's 
 position in the organic series. But his place in the vast 
 illimitable universe of space was settled once for all by the 
 physicists and astronoii.ers whose discoveries culminated two 
 hundred years ago in the " P|!rincipia " of Newton. To the same 
 
century belong the physiology of Harvey, the new anatomy 
 of the French and Italian schools, the experimental science of 
 Boyle, Pascal, and Torricelli, the analytical geometry and 
 calculus of Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz. Yet, notwith- 
 standing this enormous accumulation of scientific treasure, 
 it was still possible for a single mind to compass it all. I 
 remember Mr. Gladstone telling a body of students, of whom 
 I was one, that Leibnitz was the last of the intellectual 
 heroes who mastered the entire realm of the knowable. 
 Leibnitz died in 1716. But I believe the feat could have been 
 accomplished even in the last third ot the eighteenth cen- 
 tury by a genius like Goethe had he only possessed the ency- 
 clopaedic taste, and it was to a very considerable extent actually 
 achieved by Kant, who, however, lacked the literary and artis- 
 tic sense of which Goethe was the supreme embodiment. Such 
 universality of knowledge was the ideal of the philosopher of 
 the American Revolution. The University of Virginia still 
 preserves a manuscript volume of its founder's, containing a list 
 of books and directions for the library ; and it is refreshing for 
 the oppressed specialist of the present day to note the air of self- 
 confident omniscience with which Jefferson causes all human 
 knowledge to pass before him, and, like a true son of the 
 Parisian Aufklaritng^ pronounces it all very good, except met- 
 aphysics ! 
 
 Metaphysics is only an attempt to focus the scattered rays 
 of human knowledge. Consciously or unconsciously every 
 man is a metaphysician. Jefferson did not feci the need of a 
 
conscious system, because he lived in an age of unbroken light. 
 But the year that heard the Declaration of Independence wit- 
 nessed also the publication of the " Wealth of Nations." 
 Immortal products of human genius, they mark also the ar- 
 rival of the age of democracy and of industry — twin daughters 
 of the rights of man. The realm of letters had always been a 
 republic ; but the incorporation of science has made the circle 
 of culture wider, less exclusive than before. It has also brought 
 about and necessitated, in the intellectual world, that division 
 and co-operation of labor, whose advantages in manual opera- 
 tions Adam Smith characteristically illustrated from the making 
 of a pin. Human power is limited ; but by practice everybody 
 can learn to do at least one thing well. The success of a mining 
 or manufacturing enterprise depends upon the organization of 
 the skill of the workmen. The vast enlargement of the bound- 
 aries of knowledge in modern times is due to specialized work 
 on the part of scientists and co-operation with one another in 
 manipulating results. In the warfare with the powers of dark- 
 ness each soldier chooses his own point of attack; but he 
 waves his torch to tell his comrades where he stands and 
 what he has done, and the ranks are kept filled as the 
 ever growing circle advances. Thus the mind of man expands 
 apace. But the culture of any individual man is apt to be 
 restricted, subdued to what it works in. At the beginning of 
 the century, Alexander von Humboldt expatiated at large over 
 the broad domain of the sciences of nature ; at its close, Asa 
 Gray had mastered a part of one divisioir of the single science 
 
8 
 
 of botany. In the historical sciences, too, the growth of 
 knowledge in the race has gone on along with the specialization 
 of knowledge in the indiTidual. Since, therefore, the educated 
 man in modern times, be he humanist or naturalist, must 
 become a specialist, it would seem very desirable in the higher 
 education of our youth that some diversity of subjects should 
 be required. We are in danger of sacrificing breadth to intensity 
 of culture. And for my own part, I look with some alarm on 
 the present fashion of encouraging students no longer to take 
 a general course in language, literature, history, mathematics, 
 science, and philosophy, the educational value of which has 
 been attested by experience, but to pass their green and salad 
 days in mimicking the original research of a Faraday or a 
 Darwin. For the race education consists in the discovery of 
 something new ; for the individual this cannot begin with profit 
 until he is in possession of some considerable portion of the 
 treasure mankind has stored up. Our educationists are over- 
 looking the dependence of reproduction upon assimilation. 
 There can be no creation, even in the realm of mind, without 
 materials. These " original investigations " which callow 
 youth are now-a-days so often required to make on subjects no 
 mortal has ever thought of before, or is likely to think of again, 
 have at least the merit of novelty, and so they often pass for 
 flights of genius. But even genius needs an atmosphere. 
 There is no such truly original investigator in the world as the 
 baby. But the baby would not succeed better by refusing his 
 mother's milk. 
 
9 
 
 I have been speaking generally of the vast multiplication 
 and specialization of knowledge dnring the century. It would 
 be obviously impossible here and now to describe the process 
 in all its details. *But as the growth of the sciences consists in 
 the discovery of more general laws, which bind together the 
 facts and laws already established, the scientific achievements 
 of the century may be illustrated by glancing at some of these 
 ultimate generalizations. In the natural and physical sciences 
 the theory of evolution and the law of the conservation of 
 energy would suggest themselves to everybody ; and with these, 
 Professor Huxley, in his masterly sketch of the advance ot 
 science in the Victorian period, associates the theory of the 
 molecular constitution of matter. These may be briefly 
 described before endeavoring to follow the movement of the 
 historical and philosophical sciences, to which must be added 
 theology, once the proud queen of all. 
 
 What are things made of? is one of the first questions of 
 children and of thinkers. In the infancy of human thought 
 this germinal principle was sought in concrete substances like 
 water, air, and fire ; and at a later stage in such abstractions as 
 number and infinity. But the doctrine that matter consisted of 
 minute indivisible particles diffused through empty space, 
 carries us back to the fifth century before Christ. This was the 
 famous atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus, which, 
 after agitating the ancient world, has been a fermenting 
 principle in the modern almost since the downfall of scholas- 
 ticism, and which, in our own century, seemed to gain renewed 
 
10 
 
 confirmation from the chemical discoveries of Dalton. But 
 from the very first the atomism of Democritus has been con- 
 fronted by an antagonistic theory, towards wliich modern 
 chemistry seems to be drifting. This science is admirably 
 typical of the centenary growth of knowledge. It was in 1789 
 that Lavoisier published his Traile elemcnfaire^ which imparted 
 a new spirit to the young and rising science of chemistry. The 
 subsequent period has been devoted to observation of the 
 phenomena exhibited by elements and their compounds, and to 
 discovery of the laws of their combination and interaction. But 
 in our own day the purely empirical stage is past ; and the 
 chemist, like the astronomer, is able to predict from present 
 phenomena the character of future phenomena. His work is 
 largely synthetic. Theoretically he sees the possibility of certain 
 non-existent compounds, and with creative insight he calls 
 them into being. As the mathematics of molar motion had 
 unveiled the heavens and laid bare the mysteries of the infi- 
 nitely great, so the mathematics of molecular motion is to-day 
 reading the secrets of the infinitely little, nay, sketching the 
 architecture of that impalpable world which eye has not seen 
 nor ear heard But the mind of man had already conceived it. 
 For the latest report of the chemist is in singular accord with 
 the theory of Aristotle. It supposes a homogeneous ethereal 
 substance containing permanent whirlpools or vortices ; and 
 it affirms that the elementary units of the material world may 
 be resolved into these vortices whose properties depend on theii 
 actual and potential modes of motion. This theory of the 
 dynamical constitution of matter, which turns chemistry intoa 
 branch of mathematical physics, is one of the great scientific 
 achievements of the age. Nor does its anticipation by Aristotle 
 detract from the renown of chemistry. The modern scientist 
 
11 
 
 has embodied the speculative conception of the philosopher in 
 a larger experience, illuminated it by the evidence ot mathe- 
 matics, and expanded it into deductions that have stood the 
 test of experimental verification. As the theory passes from 
 the laboratory to the school, as it filters in dilution through the 
 press, it is destined to effect a change in popular thought not 
 unlike that produced by the astronomy of Copernicus. How 
 startling to conceive of dead material things which we have 
 always thought real solely because they are extended and solid, 
 as absolutely nothing but invisible whirls of energy ! 
 
 The theory of the molecular constitution of matter is the 
 latest solution of the world-old problem what things are made 
 of. But as things exist, so they cease to exist, or undergo 
 change. And changes are not more obvious to us than they 
 were to primitive man ten thousand or a hundred thousand 
 years ago. Whether our ancestors hid themselves in lonely 
 caves to escape the carnage of the bear and mammoth, or 
 wandered in quest of shell-fish along desolate shores where 
 winds and waves made wild commotion, or sat amidst their 
 flocks and herds watching in awe-struck wonder the regular 
 march of Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades, they saw, as we 
 see, a world where nothing is at rest, where all things change, 
 where birth seems only for the sake of death, and life is not so 
 much a state of being as a constant process of becoming. Of 
 course, they interpreted the universe by themselves. Of course, 
 they attributed change to personal volition. They saw behind 
 the shifting procession of natural events powers like them- 
 selves, though greater. And this primitive mythological theory 
 of causation was not completely vanquished by the science of 
 the Greeks. Though no place was left for it in the atomistic 
 hypothesis of Democritus, it is true that, broadly speaking, mod- 
 
12 
 
 erii scientific thought is distinguished from earlier by its rejec- 
 tion of all causes except known physical causes in the explana- 
 tion of nature, and by its possession of the true laws of motion and 
 equilibrium along with the numerous deductions to which they 
 have led since first enunciated by Galileo and Newton. These 
 laws, allied with mathematics in a fruitful union, have gener- 
 ated the ideal towards which all the sciences of nature are- to- 
 day restlessly striving. Their goal is nothing less than the de- 
 duction of all the phenomena of material bodies from mathe- 
 matico-physical first principles. The scientist is not satisfied 
 with the ascertainment of facts and their laws ; he goes on to 
 refer them to higher and ever higher laws, until he has forged 
 a chain of demonstration connecting them with the first prin- 
 ciples of statics and dynamics. He believes there is a mathe- 
 matical formula, could human wit but find it out, that would 
 express the present condition of the material world and all that 
 it contains, a formula from which its subsequent phases could 
 all be deduced and predicted, from the fall of a tree or the over- 
 flow of a river to the inundation of a continent or the collapse 
 of the sun. The rise of this scientific ideal was heralded by 
 Descartes and Hobbes. Its realization has been measurably 
 approached since 1843, by the discovery of the law of the con- 
 servation of energy, which is a fitting climax to the physical 
 laws established in the last three centuries. 
 
 The mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenth 
 century had determined the laws of molar motion, the laws, 
 that is, governing the movements of masses, whether terrestial 
 or celestial ; but the ])henomena of heat, liglil, electricity and 
 magnetism, which do not depend njion molar motion, remained 
 without any satisfactory explanation until the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. The first step towards a sound theory was the discovery 
 
13 
 
 of the correlation of the forces at work. Any one of them, it 
 was found, could be transformed into any other, or all alike de- 
 rived from a common source. It was next experimentally dem- 
 onstrated that there existed a definite relation between heat 
 and mechanical work. And it was also shown that molar motion 
 re-appears as molecular motion, or heat, without any loss of 
 energy, when a moving body is brought to rest by friction or 
 collision. These truths contain the law of the conservation of 
 energy. " The total energy of any body or system of bodies is 
 a quantity which can neither be increased nor diminished by 
 any mutual action of such bodies, though it may be transformed 
 into any one of the forms of which energy is susceptible. " When 
 you raise a stone from the earth the energy you expend is not 
 lost ; it is potential in the stone as held in the air, and is exactly 
 reproduced by its fall. At every moment of the process the 
 capital stock of energy remained the same. And this is the 
 history of all sensible existence. Force is constant and inde- 
 structible, but it undergoes continuous redistribution and 
 transformation. If the matter composing our solar system 
 originally existed in a diffused or nebulous state, its stock of 
 energy was the same as at present, and the force released by 
 the precipitation of nebulous particles into solid bodies has 
 been radiated in the form of heat and light. Some of this heat 
 is still imprisoned within our earth, the whole of which was once 
 a mass of molten matter. And it occasionally manifests itself in 
 earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Thus, throughout the 
 entire physical universe the law of the conservation of energy is 
 found to hold good. The rains, rivers, winds and waves, which 
 slowly wear away continents and fill up seas, execute simply the 
 powers committed to them by the sun, when they first rose to 
 vapory life beneath his genial rays. In the physiology of 
 
14 
 
 plants and animals the same transformation and equivalence of 
 forces has been demonstrated. And a Huxley or a Helmholtz 
 would find no difficulty in tracing to solar radiations the cere- 
 bral, nervous, and muscular energy I am now exerting. Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer has gone further. He professes to see in 
 modes of consciousness transformations of physical forces in 
 obedience to the law of the conservation of energy. But this 
 law has meaning and application only where there is motion. 
 And, though consciousness is connected with cerebral changes 
 which must conform to the laws of physics, consciousness 
 itself is not amotion on anything like' a motion. So that there 
 is no more justification to-day than there ever was before for 
 invading the domain of mind with categories and standards 
 borrowed from the material world. The subject of knowledge 
 is impassably separated from the object of knowledge. The 
 law of the conservation of energy is valid for the material 
 world alone. Mr. Spencer's further application of it to mind 
 is one of the many instances in his comprehensive philosophy 
 in which pet generalizations are allowed to eviscerate facts they 
 are inadequate to explain. This is why Darwin, the fairest 
 critic of our century, writes to his friends : " Such parts of H. 
 Spencer as I have read with care impress my mind with the 
 idea of his inexhaustible wealth of suggestion, but never con- 
 vince me. * * * * If he had trained himself to observe 
 more, even if at the expense, by the loss of balancemcnt, of 
 some loss of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful 
 man." 
 
 This brings us to the third great generalization of our cen- 
 tury, the theory of physical evolution. In its most general 
 form the theory is an old one. The belief in the transfor- 
 mation of species is common among savages, who have 
 
15 
 
 many legends of the metamorphosis of men into wild beasts. 
 And the whole philosophy of the Greeks was evolutionary. 
 Evolution means that things were not once for all created as 
 we now see them, but have reached their present condition 
 only after passing through lower phases, and gradually 
 ascending to higher. For a thousand years, from the time of 
 Thales to the close of the schools under the Empire, this was 
 the constant point of view of Hellenic thinkers, and it is 
 nobly enshrined in the immortal system of Aristotle. But in 
 the following centuries, as science died out, as communion 
 with the living facts of the world .gave way to crude and literal 
 interpretation of the books in which Hebrew seers and poets 
 had set down in lofty imagery their impressions of creation 
 and divine providence, the evolutionary point of view was lost, 
 and for the Hellenic doctrine of the eternity of the world with 
 its endless series of evolutions and dissolutions there was sub- 
 stituted the hard dogma of instantaneous creation some few 
 thousand years before. It was, therefore, something like a 
 new discovery when in the eighteenth century Kant traced the 
 evolution of the solar system from a primitive nebula in ac- 
 cordance with the laws of Newtonian physics. But the con- 
 ception of the practically infinite duration of the world in past 
 time was first brought home to the modern mind by the publi- 
 cation in 1830 of Lyell's "Principles of Geology." In 
 opposition to the catastrophists, Lyell referred the forma- 
 tion of the crust of the earth to purely natural causes, whose 
 adequacy, however, depended upon the postutate of the lapse 
 of vast geological ages since the beginning. His theory tri- 
 umphed. It satisfied the facts, and the demands of reason too. 
 But if natural causes can account for the inorganic world, 
 what of the organic ? > 
 
16 
 
 Thus the question was shaping itself in the mind of 
 Darwin. That evolution was the process of the living world 
 Goethe and Ivamarck had shown at the close of the preceding 
 century. But the hozv and the why of organic evolution was 
 still a mystery. Darwin cleared it up by his theory of natural 
 selection or survival of the fittest. This theory was suggested 
 to Darwin by his " long continued study of the works of (and 
 converse with) agriculturists and horticulturists," as he 
 wrote to Asa Gray, before it was given to the world. Breeders 
 by conscious selection produce new varieties. The variations 
 are given by nature. What man does is to select and perpetu- 
 ate them in preference to others. Now in the case of undo- 
 mesticated animals and plants, the perpetuation of certain 
 varieties is brought about by the struggle for existence, which 
 is the inevitable result of the fecundity of living organisms, 
 which increase, as Malthus had shown in the case of man, far 
 beyond the means of subsistence. Darwin does not prove that 
 the earth has been inhabited successively by ascending species 
 of living beings. That is an historical fact of which geology 
 leaves no room to doubt. Nor is Darwin father of the idea 
 that the higher are developed from the lower, and that no 
 species is fixed and immutable. It is true that in the battle 
 waged over the " Origin of Species," Darwin sometimes 
 limited his own achievement, as his " Life and Letters" show, to 
 a refutation of the dogma that species were immutable 
 creations. And no doubt he did more than any of his prede- 
 cessors to supplant this belief. But he did it, not merely by 
 ascerting that species have descended from other species, but 
 by exhibiting the causes which led to their modification. 
 Others before him had proclaimed the doctrine of transforma- 
 tion. He first discerned in the amazing fecundity of living 
 
17 
 
 beings, their minute differences from one another, and the 
 selective influence of environment, the factors and processes 
 by which new species are developed out of earlier ones. This 
 is the essence of Darwinism. All else is consequence or con- 
 comitant. How important this biological theory was felt to be 
 is evidenced by the fact that in popular speech Darwinism is 
 synonymous with evolution in general. And both are to-day 
 accepted, in substance at least. Thirty years ago our fathers 
 were quarreling over the question whether it was better to be , 
 descendend from a fallen angel or a climbing monkey, j ^ 
 To-day the issue scarcely touches us ; and we feel that it sig- "^ 
 
 nifies little how we may have been begotten, since the great 
 matter is what we are and may become. For us evolution is 
 no longer regresssion to the ape, but progression towards the 
 truly human, till it merges into the divine. On stepping 
 stones of their dead selves men rise to higher things. 
 
 We have been speaking thus far of modern discoveries 
 regarding matter, force, and life. And it is the advance of 
 chemistry, physics, and biology which most strongly impresses 
 the imagination, because of their application in relieving the 
 miseries and adding to the comforts and conveniences of man's 
 estate. These sciences have annihilated space and time, 
 revealed a new heaven, and re-created the earth. A hundred 
 years ago Washington took seven days to go from Mt. Vernon 
 to New York for his inauguration ; and he could not have made 
 the journey in less than five days even had he not been de- 
 layed by receptions. But in that time you could in this age 
 cross the ocean, or traverse the continent. In 1791 Jefferson 
 wrote to the American representatives at Paris and Madrid that 
 the quickest of their despatches were " of nine weeks, and the 
 longest of near eighteen weeks coming." To-day the telegraph 
 
18 
 
 flashes them under the ocean in as many minutes. Railroads, 
 steamers, and telegraph lines are the nervous system with 
 which modern science has endowed the hitherto unfeeling earth, 
 and transformed its divided provinces and separated continents 
 into a single sentient organism. Intercourse has removed preju- 
 dices, allayed passions, and established order. It has shown to 
 all men the humanity of men. The old divisions between Jew 
 and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, Bond and Free, had long 
 been opposed by the higher conception of the brotherhood of 
 man. But what Stoicism and the Church failed to realize has 
 been effected by the intercourse which modern science first ren- 
 dered possible, A famine in India, an earthquake in China, or 
 a flood like that which lately devastated the valley of the 
 Conemaugh, sends a shock of sorrow and a response of sym- 
 pathy and help throughout the entire world. It is impossible to 
 overestimate the service to morals, international law, and prac- 
 tical Christianity of those scientific appliances which have over- 
 come the obstacles set by nature to intercourse between man 
 and man. This achievement of our century will not be dimmed 
 by any other in the moral history of mankind. And beside it 
 we can lay with pride our physical discoveries and inventions. 
 Have we not meted out Heaven witl? the span, and compre- 
 hended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the 
 mountains in scales and the hills in a balance ? Nay, what 
 Isaiah could not conceive, we have analyzed the matter of the 
 sun and the planets. We have turned the darkness of mid- 
 night into solar brilliancy. Our remotest ancestors were prob- 
 ably ignorant of the uses of fire; and the rude drill, by which 
 savages produce it, is supposed to represent thousands of years 
 of invention. From that to the flint and steel, and thence to 
 the lucifer match was the work of centuries. Our own gener- 
 
19 
 
 ation, however, has, by the use of electricity, taken a stride 
 which belittles all the gropings of previous generations. Nor 
 is it otherwise with the great practical arts of medicine, agri- 
 culture, and manufacturing. The preservation of health and 
 the healing of diseases had scarcely advanced beyond the stage 
 at which the (jreeks left them, until a rational basis was found for 
 them in modern physiology and zoology. Since then one after 
 another of the scourges flesh is heir to has been met and con- 
 quered ; and, though scientific medicine and surgery are still in 
 their infancy, Koch's germ theory of disease has already proved a 
 most potent and promising weapon of offense and defence, while 
 Lister's antiseptic method has probably done more than any 
 other invention ever made to alleviate human suffering. Bacon, 
 the prophet of the modern scientific world, demanded a know- 
 ledge that should bear fruit to mankind. His hope has been 
 fulfilled. Nor is medicine the only proof of it. In our own cen- 
 tury agriculture, too, has been put upon a scientific basis. And 
 those manufacturing and industrial operations, which have 
 transformed the face of the modern world, superposed a new 
 nature upon the old, and even reacted upon man, its creator, 
 are, in large part, the result of the scientific discoveries and 
 practical inventions of the last hundred years. 
 
 Yet, in considering the centenary movement of thought, 
 we should leave our picture very incomplete if we stopped with 
 these conspicuous features of the scene. " In the universe 
 there is nothing great but man ; in man there is nothing great 
 but mind." And the century which has witnessed the amazing 
 growth of the sciences of nature, has seen a complete revolu- 
 tion in the sciences of man. A new conception of human civ- 
 ilization whereby all previous history is rendered obsolete : this 
 is the characteristic note in the thought of the nineteenth cen- 
 
20 
 
 tury. The conception was forced upon the Anglo-Saxon 
 mind largely by the victory of Darwinism, which is, therefore, 
 often identified with it. But in Germany, the natal soil of the 
 new idea, the two are kept distinct. Biological evolution may 
 or may not be explained by natural selection ; but in any event 
 it is onl)- an extension to animal life of a conception and 
 method which three generations of German investigators had 
 already applied with great success to human history. 
 
 Each in turn the civilized nations of the world contribute 
 their central ideas to the thought of mankind. Within the last 
 four hundred years Italy has given us Humanism, Spain 
 Dogmatism, England Empiricism, and France Rationalism. 
 The national point of view is determined somewhat by native 
 temper, and somewhat by the preceding condition of thought. 
 The Spanish principle of authority is in part a reaction against 
 the sweetness and light, and license too, of the Italian Renais- 
 sance The English appeal to experience and the French appeal 
 to reason, though superficially opposed, are, at bottom, compli- 
 mentary aspects of a single tendency. Both make for the liber- 
 ation of man from the shackles of authority, which was the dom- 
 inant idea and aim of the eighteenth century. But the French- 
 man wields a more remorseless logic than the Englishman ; and 
 he shrinks from no conclusions. English thinkers had made 
 reservations in favor of established institutions, religious and 
 political. But the school of Voltaire had no reverence for 
 crown or mitre, and was resolutely set on absolute emancipa- 
 tion from authority and conventionality. Here, as before and 
 since, it was the mission of France to stand for ideas which 
 others dared not follow ; whence her proud boast of saviour of 
 the nations. And never surely will it be forgotten, so long as 
 man retains memory of his greatest spiritual blessings, that it 
 
21 
 
 was French sinew which laid low the thicket of shams and 
 conventionalities that impeded hnman progress, and French 
 courage that bade men look for the first time at .the facts of the 
 world and of life in the pure light of reason alone. But this 
 rationalism was fraught with two serious consequences. It 
 involved a complete break with the past iiistory of mankind. 
 And it left society an atomistic collection of individual wills, 
 each proclaiming, like Coriolanus : 
 
 " I'll never 
 Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand 
 As if man were another of himself 
 And knew no other kin." 
 
 These disastrous results of the too absolute idea of France 
 — I mean the divorce from the past, the substitution of individ- 
 ual caprice and licence for authoritative objective law, and the 
 suppression of the instincts and sentiments by abstract reason 
 — were overcome by the pregnant idea with which in the last 
 part of the eighteenth century Germany revolutionized all 
 previous notions of human civilization, and marked out the 
 course of historical investigations which in countless lines our 
 century has been following. Do you ask what this mighty 
 leaven is? Behold it in the daily bread of our intellectual life. 
 Like the air we breathe, it is an unconscious possession. But 
 whenever we speak of society as an organism^ whenever we 
 conceive of languages, customs, laws, institutions, arts, litera- 
 tures, and religions as organic growllis^ whenever we regard 
 the whole life of man— intellectual, moral, and physical — as a 
 gradual developjiicnt^ we are adopting a mode of thought of 
 which our race had no inkling before the last third of the 
 Eighteenth century, and which was first proclaimed in the 
 
22 
 
 immortal "Fragments" of the youthful Herder. "This to be 
 sure is a madman or a genius," exclaimed Wieland. "He is at 
 any rate the only one for whom it is worth my while to publish 
 my ideas," said Lessing. Now the message with which this 
 youthful prodigy electrified his contemporaries is the German 
 contribution to human thought, and the animating principle 
 of its movements from that day to this. It consists in the 
 substitution of fieri for facer c — of spontaneous evolution for 
 intentional institution — as leading conception in the study and 
 interpretation of human society and human civilization. 
 
 Hence a new attitude toward the past. Heirs of all the 
 ages, we see in all the past generations of mankind flesh of 
 our flesh and spirit of our spirit. Under the German idea of 
 organic development, the most savage and remote tribes be- 
 come instinct with livijig interest to us. Like the foetus in the 
 womb, they register the stages of our own existence and his- 
 tory ; and we linger fondly and sympathetically over their 
 growing variations. We follow them through savagery to bar- 
 barism ; and as they kindle the lamps of civilization at Athens, 
 at Jerusalem, and at Rome, we recognize the lights that have 
 guided later generations, and, like fixed stars, still shed their 
 quickening radiance on our own. For us, humanity is a single 
 organism, and we have burst every horizon that would limit 
 our view of its vast illimitable life. 
 
 This vital, absorbing interest in the past is, I repeat, peculiar 
 to our own century. Dr. Johnson dismi.s.sed Hawkesworth's 
 Voyages with the contemptuous remark, " One set of .savages 
 is like anotlu-r." He could not enter into the life of societies 
 different from his own. And, though the eighteenth centur)- was 
 not behind its predecessors in classical studies, it never got a 
 firm grasp of Greeks and Romans as living men. Dr. John- 
 
23 
 
 son, as became the apostle of Saxon common sense, expressed, 
 only more emphatically, the opinion of Voltaire, when he said : 
 " The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes were a people of 
 brutes, a barbarous people." It is the tendency of most gene- 
 rations to regard themselves with complacency, but it was 
 never more pronounced than in the age of rationalism and 
 " polite manners." Their moral prejudices blinded them to 
 the worth of the past ; and even had they felt it, how could 
 they have opened the closed door of the treasure house ? 
 
 For they were hindered not only by prejudice, by lack of 
 sympathy with a culture, religion, and politics different from 
 their own, but also by the magnitude of the undertaking and 
 the scantiness of their outfit for achieving it. During the 
 seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century, while 
 other literature flourished, history, that delicate plant that lives 
 only in the air of freedom, had wilted and withered until it 
 became a byword and a reproach. Meanwhile, the field was 
 constantly enlarging. And though more remote parts had been 
 cultivated, it must not be forgotten that most of the ancient, 
 and many of the modern writers had limited themselves to 
 contemporaneous history. Thucydides, Tacitus, and Claren- 
 don will ever remain models of the old or artistic type of his- 
 tory, which aimed chiefly at portraiture and reflection, but 
 they could be of little service to a writer, who, in the eighteenth 
 century, desired to reproduce the entire social life of Greece, 
 Rome, or England. Nor, in any case, could such a writer succeed. 
 For, apart altogether from his unscientific conception of 
 society, he had no suspicion of the variety and complexity 
 of historical forces, and lacked insight into the laws of wealth 
 and industry. It was men of historical genius and vast erudi- 
 tion, it was Montesquieu and Gibbon, who ascribed the fall of 
 
24 
 
 Rome to such causes as the transportation of the gold and silver 
 to Constantinople, or the recusal of the soldiers to wear 
 defensive armor. 
 
 In the course of Providence the shortest way is not always 
 a straight line. But though the time of waiting was long, the 
 human mind was destined ultimately to attain truer conceptions 
 of its doings and manifestations in the past. With the appear- 
 ance of Herder the hour had arrived. As at other critical 
 periods, a number of pregnant circumstances combined to make 
 the revolution effective. Herder flung out his new conception 
 of mankind as a growing organism, and declared that " the 
 whole history of humanity is pure natural history of human 
 forces, actions, and instincts, according to place and time." 
 Germany, recovering from the material, intellectual, and moral 
 exhaustion of the Thirty Years' War, had entered upon that 
 career of marvellous scholarship which enabled her to carry 
 the fruitful idea of her seer into every department of knowl- 
 edge. At the same time the appearance of the " Wealth of 
 Nations," like a lamp lit in a dark place, at once illuminated 
 many of the deep, obscure, and hitherto unsolved problems of 
 political history, the study of which has ever since remained in 
 the closest alliance with economics. Lastly, that great upheaval 
 of society, called the French Revolution, was a fearful revelation 
 of social forces which had hitherto lain unsuspected beneath the 
 aiicien regime. As the calm had lulled men in the present, so the 
 storm drove them back to the past, but with entirely changed 
 notions of man and civilization. Under the notion that society 
 is a vast aggregate of forces, developing according to laws of its 
 own, all history has been re-written. And the result is that 
 with the single exception of Gibbon, the historians of the pre- 
 ceding twenty two centuries have been completely superseded 
 
25 
 
 by the historians of the century in which we live. Contem- 
 porary history is sociological ; earlier history was individualistic. 
 Our broader point of view, our deeper insight into social causes, 
 our fuller knowledge of the facts, separate our historical writings 
 toto cccio from those of preceding centuries.' But as works of 
 literary art, as models of form and expression, mankind will 
 continue to read with delight the products of the old artistic 
 type of history, which it is the glory of the Greeks to have 
 created, and adorned by compositions that remained an unap- 
 proachable ideal for sixty generations of mankind. 
 
 The first example of the modern historical method was 
 furnished by Winckelmann's History of Greek Art. Applying 
 the idea of historical development to a single branch of culture, 
 he described its growth, phases, and decay as if it were a natural 
 plant. He found the conditions of these changes in the pecul- 
 iarities of Greece, of Greek character, and Greek civilization — 
 in climate, air, race, religion, customs, and political develop- 
 ment. This was in 1764, two years before the appearance of 
 Herder's " Fragments." Undoubtedly Winckelmann gave new 
 life to antiquity. But he had not the historical divination 
 which enabled Herder first to see in early Greek heroes chiefs 
 of clans, and not conventional princes or princelings ; or to 
 catch the spirit of primitive mankind in their songs, epigrams, 
 fables, and epics ; or to originate a new conception of the 
 growth of civilization, and apply it with success to literature, 
 law, politics, and religion. Herder sowed the seed of the new 
 German idea. And, lo, the fields were soon white with harvest. 
 Schelling and Hegel reconstructed philosophy ; Niebuhr and 
 Savigny re-wrote the history of the Roman state and Roman 
 law ; Frederick Schlegel, Bopp, and Jacob Grimm created com- 
 parative philology ; Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt phy- 
 
26 
 
 siographical geography ; and William Grimm entered upon a 
 new line of research, which, in our own day, is taking shape 
 as comparative mythology and religion. Here was a magna 
 instaiiratio of the humanistic sciences. And the movement, 
 which has absorbed the best minds of our century, is still in full 
 force. So that we, who have been born too late for much that 
 is striking and heroic in history, have yet entered into the fruition 
 of that kingdom of man, whose coming Bacon foresaw and 
 longed for, but whose method and significance he only faintly 
 discerned. 
 
 Our boon, however, has brought its burden and its task. 
 It was inevitable that the new kingdom of man should resist 
 the pretensions put forward in the name of the kingdom of 
 Heaven. An'd in America, at least, we cannot say that peace 
 has yet been restored. Bacon had no consciousness of our 
 problem, because he sharply separated theology and science, 
 taking the one on authority and the other -on the evidence of 
 complete induction. It was an indolent, not to say cowardly, 
 way of establishing religious faith ; as much opposed to the 
 central principle of Protestantism as to the dictates of honesty 
 and common sense. And in a democracy like ours, where there 
 is no privileged class or church, a return to Bacon's device, 
 even though in the supposed interests of religion, is a manifest 
 outrage upon conscience and intelligence. It is true that faith 
 is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not 
 .seen. But the hope must have an intelligible basis ; and the 
 unseen must rise from the margin of the seen. I do not mean 
 that every man must be a philosopher. Now, as always, the 
 vast majority will get their religion as they get their beliefs and 
 prejudices about other things; they will take it from the form 
 and pressure of their social environment. lUit I mean that 
 
27 
 
 whenever a man does begin to reflect upon the subject, he will 
 recognize that religious faith demands the support of evidence 
 in precisely the same way as scientific belief or hypothesis. 
 
 In saying this, however, I shall not be understood to attach 
 much importance to the so-called warfare between natural 
 science and religion. The conflict is an imaginary one, so in- 
 substantial that I can liken it to nothing but the still more 
 imaginary reconciliation. How any discoveries in astronomy, 
 geology, or biology should permanently affect a man's sense of 
 his eternal life with the Spirit of all spirits, remains absolutely 
 inconceivable. And, in truth, the so-called warfare between 
 science and religion never had any other meaning (a few verses 
 of the Bible apart) than the natural inertia of ignorance 
 when acted upon by knowledge. In the history of mankind 
 there has been a deathless struggle between science and 
 nescience. But you miss its essential features when, following ,/ 
 the mythological instinct, you personif)- nescience as the / ' 
 Christian Church, and see in its resistance merely the hand of 
 priestly power, cunning, and ambition. 
 
 The religion of Christ has nothing to fear from natural and 
 physical science. And, excepting always a few passages like 
 the account of creation, neither has the most literal theology that . 
 has ever been extracted from the Bible. But Biblical theology 
 cannot plead the same independence of the historical sciences. 
 The sanctity of religion could not, and should not, protect its 
 literary documents from re-examination in the light of the new 
 German idea and method which during the century have rev- 
 olutionized our notions of all other branches of human civiliza- 
 tion. Has the flood of love and light with which Germany has 
 warmed and illuminated the past quickened all the sciences of 
 man, save that which deals with the most massive and perma- 
 
28 
 
 iient factors in human life? This surely is inconceivable. 
 The German gift of the power to interpret other ages and 
 civilizations by means of the historical and comparative 
 method has, in fact, achieved more astounding results in deal- 
 ing with the Bible than with any other subject. Whether we 
 will or not we can never again think of that wonderful book as 
 the men of the eighteenth century thought of it. You may 
 abuse the Biblical critics from Strauss and Bauer to Renan, 
 Kuenen, and Wellhausen; but all the same you cannot keep what 
 is scientfic in their views from fusion with the thought and 
 culture of our age. This, however, need not prevent us from 
 seeing that the Old Testament is a faithful record of the grow- 
 ing apprehension and reverence of God by his children; and 
 that the New Testament gives us, in the life of Jesus of Naza- 
 reth, a wonderful fulfilment of prophetic yearning, though in 
 a far higher sense than mechanical interpreters were wont to 
 suppose ; — fulfillment in a life which is, shall I say, the miracle 
 of history, or rather the clear revelation of the fatherhood ol 
 God. 
 
 " They are all based on history," says Lessing, in Nathan 
 der JVeise, of the three great religions ot the world. Chris- 
 tian theology, therefore, must be progressive; it can never 
 stand still. When Lord Macaulay declared it stationary, he 
 spoke in the spirit of the old, not in the spirit of the new 
 and evolutionary history. We must learn in matters of faith, 
 too, to 
 
 " Rejoice that man 
 Is hurled from change to change unceasingly." 
 
 Or, Still better, we have the alternative of a faith so 
 erounded on the eternal verities and established in the soul as to 
 
29 
 
 be independent of time and circumstance, which form the sub- 
 ject of history. The witness of the spirit can save faith 
 from shipwreck amid the shoals and quick-sands of that 
 Biblical criticism, which no broad thinker can to-day ignore. 
 
 Here faith and philosophy would clasp hands. For what 
 the speculative thought of the century seems to be making ever 
 clearer is that the old divisions between man and God, God and 
 the world, natural and supernatural, knowledge and revelation, 
 purpose and causation, are in large part at least arbitrary and 
 illusory ; and that a philosophic conception of all existence 
 leads to the belief in an infinite spirit, revealing itself in diverse 
 forms and with various degrees of reality, but reaching its 
 highest manifestation in man, who not only exists but is 
 conscious of his existence, and as special partaker of the life of 
 God may be truly said in Him to live, and move, and have his 
 being. If I am mistaken in regarding this as the religious 
 outcome of the centenary movement of thought, it is at any 
 rate a consummation devoutly to be wished. 
 
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