VOL. 35

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M°

I.

ODERN thought, like modern life, is strikingly complex, flowing in innumerable channels, with diverse eddies and strange backward turnings and thwart currents. It suggests an ocean with vast ebbs and flows and mysteriously winding streams, tending definitely no whither, rather than a great river system into which all the fountains and rivulets of a continent pour their independent contributions under compulsion of one general inclination of the land. And yet a broad survey will reveal that the latter is the truer image, as believers in human progress will be predisposed to admit. There is a movement of mind in our great age, and it is not the movement of the seas, which but ebb and flow, raising vain expectations, and leaving only wreckage on barren shores, or which but rage impotently under the lash of the storm-demon, unable to conquer the coasts against which they break; nor is it the movement of that stream conceived by the ancients as encircling the orbis terrarum,-flowing, indeed, but from no source to no sea, like an ancient castle moat.

All progress, indeed, brings forth contradictions. Where there is much activity there will inevitably be conflict, opposition, reaction. Where there is vigor and

boldness of thought in one direction toward any goal, there will be aroused hitherto inert forces of opposition, of conservatism, of obstruction; and these will be taken by some to be the true signs of the tendencies of the age. It is as when a great inundation occurs and sets adrift the debris that for years has lain undisturbed in the mud of former overflows; but now a new high-water mark is registered; old deposits are broken up and carried into the main stream; only here and there a back-current gains a portion of the drift and carries it up stream and there leaves it ashore. Hardly would any one be found so foolish as to take the movement of this drift as an evidence that the river flowed toward the mountains, not toward the seas.

But in judging of the vastly complex movements of mind we are in far greater danger of being misled. Each observer is too apt to see what he desires and expects to see. His own thoughts are reflected in every book he reads; his own theories of life and the universe appear to be corrobrated by every philosophical system; the events and births of time take their character from his imagination; the outward world is but the projection of his inward world. Against this predisposition we must be on our guard.

We must endeavor, in the true spirit of criticism, as Matthew Arnold expresses it, to see and understand things as they really are, not try to refashion them to accord with our wishes. An open mind, a large knowledge of literature and history, of what has been achieved in other ages of the world, a perfect confidence in truth, these are of greater value to us in this undertaking than much ingenuity. Our task is mainly a mere setting forth of facts, with a very small amount of

comment.

The manifold greatness of the nineteenth century is evinced by the answers that every profession, every vocation and trade, every science and department of knowledge, and every art will give when questioned on the matter. So conspicuous to all have been certain kinds of achievement that we probably, for different occasions, would designate it now the century of this, now the century of that distinction. We are told, and we all admit it, that it was the age of science, and no previous age can at all be compared with it in this regard. The careful student of our times will discern that the scientific spirit has entered into and dominates every sphere of life and thought that the results of science have had a bearing upon all our conceptions, our entire way of thinking.

The enormous machinery of farm and factory, the railroad, the telegraph, the electric light-these are only the more conspicuous evidences of progress in the common view. The scientist himself will say that the discovery of new forces and laws and elements in nature, not the mechanical applications and uses of them, is the great work of science and the great work of the century. The historian will tell us that it was a century of vast political changes and of great achievements in the art of government and marked progress in free institutions. The economist will tell you that it was a great commercial era, by far the greatest in human history; that wealth increased a thousandfold in three generations, and

that the comforts and conveniences of life multiplied in the same time so remarkably that we cannot quite imagine the pravity and simplicity of life of a century ago. Answering like the scientist, he will tell you also that in the organization of labor, in the growth of a new spirit among the working classes, in the rise of new social and industrial conditions, the really great and significant results of progress are to be observed. He will tell you that the nineteenth century is the age of democracy in an entirely new sense of the word, and that the growth of this spirit is the great feature of our age. Then the educator will tell you that it has been preeminent for educational advancement. He will show by statistics the wonderful growth of colleges and universities; the multiplication of libraries, newspapers and magazines. He will instance the creation of our free public-school system -a product of the new democracy and the corresponding theory of popular government. The religionist will affirm that in this age Christianity has achieved greater things than in any period since the Cross became the standard of Rome. He will cite the Christian conquest, by men of peace and love, of continent and island, of nation and tribe, in evidence that it was a great missionary age.

In other high realms of spiritual activity-in literature, art and music,the age was no less great-though here many have thought the contrary. The musician, however, tells us unequivocally that the nineteenth was "the Musical Century." It was the century of almost all the world's great musicians: Beethoven, the Shakespeare of his art; Wagner, the Sir Walter Scott; Chopin, the Tennyson; Schubert, and Schumann, and Liszt, and Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Rubenstein-how the list stretches out! It is really a most significant fact, for music is a high spiritual matter, very closely akin to religion.

But the student of literature will not be outdone by the musician in the enumeration of illustrious names. He will

hand you the thousand years' history of modern literature and let you see for yourself that a full half of its records belong to the last hundred years: many great historians, many great novelists, many great essayists, many great orators, many great philosophers, many great poets-I really must not undertake to mention even representatives of the several classes. But it is with these, especially with the men of letters, the poets and prophets, as strictly the true spokesmen and representatives of their times, that we shall here concern ourselves, with the intention of showing how the main tendencies of thought, the great intellectual movement, the tempers and traits of mind of the nineteenth century are embodied in their productions.

Byron, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, Tennyson, Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Stanley, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell I confine myself to the AngloSaxon race, and give but a partial list— these reflect, and more than reflect, they immortally express, the ideas, the aspirations, the fears and doubts, the beliefs and unbeliefs, the whole mind of the century in which they shine like stars.

The task I have in hand is, I am fully aware, a very large one, and I am sensible of the presumption anyone is apt to expose himself to the charge of in proposing himself as the interpreter of so vast a century. But it has for a long time been my business to study the poets and to interpret them to others; and a very little reflection will bring home to the dullest mind that there is no understanding of a poet apart from the general temper, speculations, and intellectual character of his age; therefore, if for no other reason-and other reasons have been irresitably strong with me—I have made an earnest endeavor to appreciate what science and philosophy also achieved in the nineteenth century, and what the main lines of progress were.

On the very first day of the nineteenth century an Italian astronomer sweeping the heavens with his telescope beheld a

new planet speeding around the sun,—a world never before seen by mortal eyes. This discovery may be taken as grandly prophetic of the new worlds of thought that were to be revealed to the human mind in the following epoch. The enlargement of the mental horizon of humanity during the century was indeed commensurate with its marvelous astronomical discoveries and can be illustrated adequately only by their vastness and splendor. In truth there is a closer relation between such discoveries and men's thinking in apparently the remotest matters than is generally imagined. The influence of Sir William Herschel's revelation that the stars are suns, and these myriads of suns are the probable centers of planetary systems many of them greater than ours, begets reflections of momentous reach and import. Man's intellectual horizon expands under such revelations with the speed of light.

It was once atheistical to affirm that the earth moved and that it was but one of many similar planets that revolve about the sun as their center. For teaching this doctrine Gallileo was imprisoned and Bruno was burned at the stake. But Sir William Herschel revealed that the entire solar and planetary system to which our earth, as but a minor orb, belongs, is only one of innumerable similar systems in an infinite universe of worlds, systems, and groups of systems.

In another respect, too, the same great astronomer's telescope had startling truths to reveal, which were to affect men's thoughts in unsuspected spheres. For the universe that he beheld through lenses perfected by his own patient toil was not a universe finished, uniform, and in repose, but a universe exhibiting in its various parts every stage of development from the formless eddying dust-cloud of worlds yet in the process of evolution to the dead satellites that have had their day and now with borrowed luster only make beautiful the night of the inhabitants of younger orbs. The sublime truth which rises in man's thoughts to

consciousness in view of this great disclosure is of a God who works hitherto, who displays the power of his hand, yet building and re-building, thinking in terms of stars and constellations, systems and galaxies that no mind less than infinite can measure. The song of creation is an eternal song, and the poem of Genesis is being written in act and material form, now and forever, through all the ages, in the heavens. This is the truth which the stars declare.

Another science, which may be said to have been born in the nineteenth century, the science of Geology, had, possibly, a still greater influence on speculative thought than Astronomy did. It would seem that the least harmless of all studies would be that of the homely earth; and yet the geologist has destroyed many of our inherited ideas, overthrown whole systems of thought, and started vast mental revolutions. The conception which now among all classes of educated persons prevails of the uniform operation of nature's laws and forces throughout all the ages, and the indefinite extension backward of those ages during which those laws and forces have been at work shaping this world and others like it, this conception of uniformity and of vast eons of time, had its birth in the nineteenth century. And its influence upon speculative thought has been incalculably great. It has modified men's ideas of the Creator and of His ways in bringing worlds into being. It has combined with other conceptions of like novelty and like greatness to enlarge our intellectual horizon and to emancipate the mind from traditional views in every realm of thought. It has introduced the idea of law and of uniformity-I recur to this as of chief significance into all our thinking about nature and the power which is in nature.

A few instances of the previous way of thinking will sufficiently reveal its crudeness and simplicity. Far into the century fossils, for example, were generally believed have all been imbedded in

their rocks at the time of Noah's flood. And, for that matter, all the rock formations themselves were supposed to have been the work of but the brief space of 5,000 or 6,000 years since the creation of Adam. No order in the earth's strata had as yet been observed, no succession of animal populations had been guessed. And without such conceptions of a continuous and regular order in the rock formations and of a definite, progressive succession of plant and animal species in the world, the old estimate of the earth's age was of course entirely adequate.

But an actual study of the earth brought forth startling results of most far-reaching consequences. The first great discovery in this field is accredited to a practical surveyor, a self-educated man of independent and unprejudiced ways of thinking, whom fate tried to conceal by naming him William Smith. It was this man for whom the earth waited, we do not know how many centuries, to make known the fact of the orderly arrangement of its formations and the fixed progression from lower to higher in the orders of its living creatures, as indicated by fossils. But his views, of course, did not immediately find acceptance. They were declared to be opposed to the plain account of Genesis and were therefore denounced as atheistical in tendency. But it was too late in the world's history for an unwelcome truth to be stamped out, or to perish for centuries with its proclaimer at the stake. Other investigators made discoveries, one after another, that tended to confirm the doctrine of the wise-headed surveyor. And as investigation proceeded there were propounded and established yet other revolutionary theories, dealing with other geological phenomena. The chief of these was that the forces of nature as at present seen in operation around us are altogether adequate to account for the configurations of the earth which had before been attributed to great and sudden catastrophes. According to this new doctrine, which was called Uniformi

tarianism, the continents and seas, the mountains and plains, the rivers and lakes, all the features of the physical world were given their present shape, not in general by sudden and intermittent eruptions, but by long, slow and constant processes, such as are exhibited everywhere in present operation. In this view, again, the reign of law is affirmed as against chance, or unintelligible Catastrophism, on the one hand, and arbitrary unintelligible divine intervention on the other.

Sir Alfred Lyell's Principles of Geology, published in 1835, is the book that stands out with the greatest prominence in the history of this science. The service that it rendered to research in other fields, especially to biology, was also notable, as we shall see.

The science of biology belongs so exclusively to the nineteenth century that not even the word was used before that time. It was in 1802 that two writers first independently employed the term. To be sure it would be a very erroneous way of thinking to suppose that men had not before, had not always, indeed, given more or less attention to the phenomena of plant and animal life, to the development and modification of structures, and the like matters. But, while many facts had been observed, and while by Erasmus, by Darwin, by Lamarck, by Goethe, and other great students of nature, the biological theories of two generations later were anticipated just at the close of the eighteenth century, yet it was not until past the middle of the nineteenth century that their views, revised and corrected with larger knowledge, entered into the common thought of educated men. When Charles Darwin, in 1859, published his Origin of Species the world, even the scientific part of it, was startled as by something entirely novel. The grandfather, who had put the question, Can it be that one form of organism has developed from another?" Goethe, who had definitely affirmed the development of one species from another and had

remarked the metamorphosis of structures; Lamarck who had boldly asserted the doctrine of one common origin for all animals, including man, explaining the the transmutation of species as due to processes of self-adaptation to environment, these investigators with their theories had apparently been forgotten, and their memories were revived by the truly epoch-making book of 1859, which restated and established the truth that was in their views, but which owed them no debt, beyond possible suggestions.

The extraordinary significance of Charles Darwin's work is in no degree diminished by a recognition of the honor which rightly belongs to his great predecessors. Their investigations and their reasonings based upon their investigations did not result, as Darwin's did, in breaking up the old foundations of their science and of laying them anew. Other realms of thought were still less affected,although, beyond doubt, such views having once been published to the world could not but exert an influence on the human mind. Lyell's summary, in his Principles of Geology, of the doctrines of Lamarck is an evidence that those doctrines had not and were not to be wholly forgotten.

The battle that was waged, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, around the Origin of Species bears testimony to the importance which all classes of thinkers attached to the inductions of Darwin. Their thoroughly revolutionary and far-reaching significance was at once discerned. If these inductions were true, if his main thesis-the origin of species by natural selection-was true, then history would have to be rewritten, every science that deals with living organisms, nay, with human life and human thought even, would have to be re-written from this point-of-view. With this doctrine of evolution as a guiding principle all future thinking must be done. This was perceived, and this has proved true. name of Darwin stands for an epoch in the intellectual history of the human race.

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