The remarks which my friend Mr. Clark has made with reference to the reconciling of science and religion seem to carry me back to the days when I first became acquainted with the fact that there were such things afloat in the world as speculations about the origin of man from lower forms of life; and I can recall step by step various stages in which that old question has come to have a different look from what it had thirty years ago. One of the commonest objections we used to hear, from the mouths of persons who could not very well give voice to any other objection, was that anybody, whether he knows much or little about evolution, must have the feeling that there is something degrading about being allied with lower forms of life. That was, I suppose, owing to the survival of theold feeling that a dignified product of creation ought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That which was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its value. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something supernatural; that state of culture in which there was an altogether inadequate appreciation of the amount of grandeur that there might be in the slow creative work that goes on noiselessly by little minute increments, even as the dropping of the water that wears away the stone. The general progress of familiarity with the conception of evolution has done a great deal to change that state of mind. Even persons who have not much acquaintance with science have at length caught something of its lesson,—that the infinitely cumulative action of small causes like those which we know is capable of producing results of the grandest and most thrilling importance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmic and miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we are outgrowing with wider experience.
The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact thewhole advance of modern science from the days of Copernicus down to the present day, have consisted in the substitution of processes which are familiar and the application of those processes, showing how they produce great results.
When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gave us that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life from allied forms through the operation of natural selection, it must have been like a mental illumination to every person who comprehended it. But after all it left a great many questions unexplained, as was natural. It accounted for the phenomena of organic development in general with wonderful success, but it must have left a great many minds with the feeling: If man has been produced in this way, if the mere operation of natural selection has produced the human race, wherein is the human race anyway essentially different from lower races? Is not man really dethroned, taken down from that exceptional position in which we have been accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, in the course of the future, for other beings to come upon the earth as far superior to man as man is superior to the fossilized dragons of Jurassic antiquity?
Such questions used to be asked, and when they were asked, although one might have a very strongfeeling that it was not so, at the same time one could not exactly say why. One could not then find any scientific argument for objections to that point of view. But with the further development of the question the whole subject began gradually to wear a different appearance; and I am going to give you a little bit of autobiography, because I think it may be of some interest in this connection. I am going to mention two or three of the successive stages which the whole question took in my own mind as one thing came up after another, and how from time to time it began to dawn upon me that I had up to that point been looking at the problem from not exactly the right point of view.
When Darwin's "Descent of Man" was published in 1871, it was of course a book characterized by all his immense learning, his wonderful fairness of spirit and fertility of suggestion. Still, one could not but feel that it did not solve the question of the origin of man. There was one great contrast between that book and his "Origin of Species." In the earlier treatise he undertook to point out avera causaof the origin of species, and he did it. In his "Descent of Man" he brought together a great many minor generalizations which facilitated the understanding of man's origin. But he did not come at all near to solving the central problem,nor did he anywhere show clearly why natural selection might not have gone on forever producing one set of beings after another distinguishable chiefly by physical differences. But Darwin's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, at an early stage in his researches, struck out a most brilliant and pregnant suggestion. In that one respect Wallace went further than ever Darwin did. It was a point of which, indeed, Darwin admitted the importance. It was a point of which nobody could fail to understand the importance, that in the course of the evolution of a very highly organized animal, if there came a point at which it was of more advantage to that animal to have variations in his intelligence seized upon and improved by natural selection than to have physical changes seized upon, then natural selection would begin working almost exclusively upon that creature's intelligence, and he would develop in intelligence to a great extent, while his physical organism would change but slightly. Now, that of course applied to the case of man, who is changed physically but very slightly from the apes, while he has traversed intellectually such a stupendous chasm.
As soon as this statement was made by Wallace, it seemed to me to open up an entirely new world of speculation. There was this enormous antiquityof man, during the greater part of which he did not know enough to make history. We see man existing here on the earth, no one can say how long, but surely many hundreds of thousands of years, yet only during just the last little fringe of four or five thousand years has he arrived at the point where he makes history. Before that, something was going on, a great many things were going on, while his ancestors were slowly growing up to that point of intelligence where it began to make itself felt in the recording of events. This agrees with Wallace's suggestion of a long period of psychical change, accompanied by slight physical change.
Well, in the spring of 1871, when Darwin's "Descent of Man" came out, just about the same time I happened to be reading Wallace's account of his experiences in the Malay Archipelago, and how at one time he caught a female orang-outang with a new-born baby, and the mother died, and Wallace brought up the baby orang-outang by hand; and this baby orang-outang had a kind of infancy which was a great deal longer than that of a cow or a sheep, but it was nothing compared to human infancy in length. This little orang-outang could not get up and march around, as mammals of less intelligence do, when he was first born, or within three or four days; but after threeor four weeks or so he would get up, and begin taking hold of something and pushing it around, just as children push a chair; and he went through a period of staring at his hands, as human babies do, and altogether was a good deal slower in getting to the point where he could take care of himself. And while I was reading of that I thought, Dear me! if there is any one thing in which the human race is signally distinguished from other mammals, it is in the enormous duration of their infancy; but it is a point that I do not recollect ever seeing any naturalist so much as allude to.
It happened at just that time that I was making researches in psychology about the organization of experiences, the way in which conscious intelligent action can pass down into quasi-automatic action, the generation of instincts, and various allied questions; and I thought, Can it be that the increase of intelligence in an animal, if carried beyond a certain point, must necessarily result in prolongation of the period of infancy,—must necessarily result in the birth of the mammal at a less developed stage, leaving something to be done, leaving a good deal to be done, after birth? And then the argument seemed to come along very naturally, that for every action of life, every adjustment which a creature makes in life, whether amuscular adjustment or an intelligent adjustment, there has got to be some registration effected in the nervous system, some line of transit worn for nervous force to follow; there has got to be a connection between certain nerve-centres before the thing can be done, whether it is the acts of the viscera or the acts of the limbs, or anything of that sort; and of course it is obvious that if the creature has not many things to register in his nervous system, if he has a life which is very simple, consisting of few actions that are performed with great frequency, that animal becomes almost automatic in his whole life; and all the nervous connections that need to be made to enable him to carry on life get made during the fœtal period or during the egg period, and when he comes to be born, he comes all ready to go to work. As one result of this, he does not learn from individual experience, but one generation is like the preceding generations, with here and there some slight modifications. But when you get the creature that has arrived at the point where his experience has become varied, he has got to do a good many things, and there is more or less individuality about them; and many of them are not performed with the same minuteness and regularity, so that there does not begin to be that automatism within the period during which he isbeing developed and his form is taking on its outlines. During prenatal life there is not time enough for all these nervous registrations, and so by degrees it comes about that he is born with his nervous system perfectly capable only of making him breathe and digest food,—of making him do the things absolutely requisite for supporting life; instead of being born with a certain number of definite developed capacities, he has a number of potentialities which have got to be roused according to his own individual experience. Pursuing that line of thought, it began after a while to seem clear to me that the infancy of the animal in a very undeveloped condition, with the larger part of his faculties in potentiality rather than in actuality, was a direct result of the increase of intelligence, and I began to see that now we have two steps: first, natural selection goes on increasing the intelligence; and secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough, it makes a longer infancy, a creature is born less developed, and therefore there comes this plastic period during which he is more teachable. The capacity for progress begins to come in, and you begin to get at one of the great points in which man is distinguished from the lower animals, for one of those points is undoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any onewill say, with very little hesitation, that if it were not for our period of infancy we should not be progressive. If we came into the world with our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would be very much like another.
Then, looking round to see what are the other points which are most important in which man differs from the lower animals, there comes that matter of the family. The family has adumbrations and foreshadowings among the lower animal, but in general it may be said that while mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man have become established those peculiar relationships which constitute what we know as the family; and it is easy to see how the existence of helpless infants would bring about just that state of things. The necessity of caring for the infants would prolong the period of maternal affection, and would tend to keep the father and mother and children together, but it would tend especially to keep the mother and children together. This business of the marital relations was not really a thing that became adjusted in the primitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course of civilization. Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent, belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the early stages the knitting togetherof permanent relations between mother and infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male parent, came to bring the family, and gradually to knit those organizations which we know as clans.
Here we come to another stage, another step forward. The instant society becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let these clans be broken up and die out,—the clan becomes the chief object or care of natural selection, because if you destroy it you retrograde again, you lose all you have gained; consequently, those clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were so modified that the individual conduct would be subordinated to some extent to the needs of the clan,—those are the ones which would prevail in the struggle for life. In this way you gradually get an external standard to which man has to conform his conduct, and you get the germs of altruism and morality; and in the prolonged affectionate relation between the mother and the infant you get the opportunity for that development of altruistic feeling which, once started in those relations, comes into play in the more general relations, and makes more feasible and more workable the bonds which keep society together, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms.
So it seems that from a very small beginning weare reaching a very considerable result. I had got these facts pretty clearly worked out, and carried them around with me some years, before a fresh conclusion came over me one day with a feeling of surprise. In the old days before the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, man regarded himself as the centre of the universe. He used to entertain theological systems which conformed to his limited knowledge of nature. The universe seemed to be made for his uses, the earth seemed to have been fitted up for his dwelling place, he occupied the centre of creation, the sun was made to give him light, etc. When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect upon theology was certainly tremendous. I do not believe that justice has ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he was made to realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod of dirt in the universe, and that there were so many other worlds greater than this. It was one of the first great shocks involved in the change from ancient to modern scientific views, and I do not doubt it was responsible for a great deal of the pessimistic philosophizing that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago—after thinking about this manner in which manoriginated—that man occupies certainly just as exceptional a position as before, if he is the terminal in a long series of evolutionary events. If at the end of the long history of evolution comes man, if this whole secular process has been going on to produce this supreme object, it does not much matter what kind of a cosmical body he lives on. He is put back into the old position of theological importance, and in a much more intelligent way than in the old days when he was supposed to occupy the centre of the universe. We are enabled to say that while there is no doubt of the evolutionary process going on throughout countless ages which we know nothing about, yet in the one case where it is brought home to us we spell out an intelligible story, and we do find things working along up to man as a terminal fact in the whole process. This is indeed a consistent conclusion from Wallace's suggestion that natural selection, in working toward the genesis of man, began to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes. Obviously, here you are started upon a new chapter in the history of the universe. It is no longer going to be necessary to shape new limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new growths of hair, when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can take some other animal's hide andmake it into clothes. You have got to a new state of things.
After I had put together all these additional circumstances with regard to the origination of human society and the development of altruism, I began to see a little further into the matter. It then began to appear that not only is man the terminal factor in a long process of evolution, but in the origination of man there began the development of the higher psychical attributes, and those attributes are coming to play a greater and greater part in the development of the human race. Just take this mere matter of "altruism," as we call it. It is not a pretty word, but must serve for want of a better. In the development of altruism from the low point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together, up to the point reached at the present day, there has been a notable progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount of improvement. The progress has been all in the direction of bringing out what we call the higher spiritual attributes. The feeling was now more strongly impressed upon me than ever, that all these things tended to set the whole doctrine of evolution into harmony with religion; that if the past through which man had originated was such as has been described, then religion was a fit and worthy occupationfor man, and some of the assumptions which underlie every system of religion must be true. For example, with regard to the assumption that what we see of the present life is not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the question beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a life eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to produce a merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were coming in with the family, when society was taking its first start, there came into the human mind—how one can hardly say, but there did come—the beginnings of a groping after something that lies outside and beyond the world of sense. That groping after a spiritual world has been going on here for much more than a hundred thousand years, and it has played an enormous part in the history of mankind, in the whole development of human society. Nobody can imagine what mankind would have been without it up to the present time. Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantom that does not exist, or a reachingout after something that does exist, but of which man, with his limited intelligence, has only been able to gain a crude idea. And the latter seems a far more probable conclusion, because, if it is not so, it constitutes a unique exception to all the operations of evolution we know about. As a general thing in the whole history of evolution, when you see any internal adjustment reaching out toward something, it is in order to adapt itself to something that really exists; and if the religious cravings of man constitute an exception, they are the one thing in the whole process of evolution that is exceptional and different from all the rest. And this is surely an argument of stupendous and resistless weight.
I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in the order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of illustration. The net result of the whole is to put evolution in harmony with religious thought,—not necessarily in harmony with particular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the great religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appear to exist between religion and science is likely to disappear. So I think it will before a great while. If you take the case of some evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is perfectly sure that materialismaccounts for everything (he has got it all cut and dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is really no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led him to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he started from some purely arbitrary assumption, like the French materialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter would be the true explanation. There are a good many people who start on their theories of evolution with these ultimate questions all settled to begin with. It was the most natural thing in the world that after the first assaults of science upon old beliefs, after a certain number of Bible stories and a certain number of church doctrines had been discredited, there should be a school of men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove by the methods of physical science, and we will throw everything else overboard." That was very much the state of mind of the famous French atheists of the last century. But only think how chaotic nature was to their minds compared to what she is to our minds to-day. Just think how we have in the present century arrived where we can see the bearings of one set of facts in natureas collated with another set of facts, and contrast it with the view which even the greatest of those scientific French materialists could take. Consider how fragmentary and how lacking in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe we can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be an atheistic world. That hostility between science and religion continued as long as religion was linked hand in hand with the ancient doctrine of special creation. But now that the religious world has unmoored itself, now that it is beginning to see the truth and beauty of natural science and to look with friendship upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporary antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of regarding as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps quicker than we realize.
There is one point that is of great interest in this connection, although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened in that dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase of his powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense importance. Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained that the human race would never have become human if it had not been for the hand. I do not know that there was so very much exaggerationabout that. It was certainly of great significance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligence increased far enough to make it worth while for natural selection to work upon intelligence alone was the race which had developed hands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era in the history of creation when that creature could take a club and use it for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to this, the career of man has been that of a person who has operated upon his environment in a different way from any animal before him. An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man learned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that course of culinary development of which we have seen the climax in our dainty dinner this evening. Here was another means of acting upon the environment. Here was the beginning of the working of endless physical and chemical changes through the application of heat, just as the first use of the club or the crowbar was the beginning of an enormous development in the mechanical arts.
Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past, when ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found expressionin the crudest form of myths, the æsthetic sense was germinating likewise. Away back in the glacial period you find pictures drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler, portraitures of mammoths and primitive pictures of the chase; you see the trinkets, the personal decorations, proving beyond question that the æsthetic sense was there. There has been an immense æsthetic development since then. And I believe that in the future it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet begun to realize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of his thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations. This is going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind. There is something strongly educational and disciplinary in the mere dealing with matter, whether it be in the manual training school, whether it be in carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and total depravity of inanimate things, shaping them to your will, and also in learning to subject yourself to their will (for sometimes you must do that in order to achieve your conquests; in other words, you must humour their habits and proclivities). In all this there is a priceless discipline, moral as well as mental, let alone the fact that, in whatever kind of artisticwork a man does, he is doing that which in the very working has in it an element of something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for motives not very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of which is the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself; he is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer relations to his fellow man.
In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and shelter,—those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in discriminating man from thelower animals, is that he is the one creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind, this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than a mere animate machine.
May, 1895.
In approaching the subject of the origins of liberal thought in America, one cannot help remembering that the discovery of the new continent was itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the world had never before witnessed. From time immemorial, the trade between Europe and the remote parts of Asia had followed certain customary routes. From ancient days, long before Olympiads were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly beards commemorated their victories in arrow-headed inscriptions, men had used those same routes. Up the Red Sea, in the early prime of hundred-gated Thebes, came ships from the Indian Ocean, with gems and spices to exchange for Egyptian fine linens and amulets of amber from the Baltic; and five thousand years later Venetian argosies at Alexandria were laden with just suchgems and spices to distribute to the merchants of Augsburg, the royal household at Paris, the lords and ladies of Haddon Hall. Empires rose and fell, creeds and pantheons came and went, stately temples reared their heads for centuries and slowly crumbled in ruins, and still amid all the secular change the world's great stream of trade flowed through the same unshifting channels, and there was nothing to show that this state of things, to which men's ideas and habits had always been adjusted, was not to endure forever. 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 men of Europe suddenly found themselves placed in new and unsuspected relations to the planet on which they lived; worlds of barbarism and savagery, unheard of and unspeakably bizarre, were brought to their notice; strange constellations arose in the firmament; strange beastsand birds were encountered amid outlandish trees and shrubs in new climates beyond unknown seas. The old familiarity with nature's aspects received an abrupt shock. On every side loomed up new questions to be answered, new practical problems to be solved. 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.
The impulse thus given to free thinking must have been extremely powerful. It is customary to attribute the brilliant efflorescence of the human mind in the sixteenth century to the revival of Greek learning. Without seeking to diminish the respect due to that mighty cause, it may be contended that the influence of maritime discovery was equally important. While the Greek renaissance brought men into wholesome and stimulating intercourse with the highest achievements ofliterature, art, and philosophy, the discovery of the New World impressed upon them, as nothing had ever done before, the feasibleness of doing things in novel ways. With the wholesale displacement of commercial relations, the European mind burst the bounds of the snug little world to which its habits and theories, its politics civil and ecclesiastical, its science and its theology, had been adapted. The sudden and unprecedented widening of the environment soon set up a general fermentation of ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin Luther's coming in the next generation after Columbus. Nor was it strange that in the following age the English mind, wrought to its highest tension under the combined influences of Renaissance, Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have put forth a literature the boldest and grandest that had ever appeared; that the era of Raleigh and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have seen even the highest mark of Greek achievement surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic revolution set on foot by Copernicus was already in full progress, the era of Descartes was just arriving, and the next century was to see modern scientific method receive its supreme illustration at the hands of Newton, while the principles of freedom in thought and speech were to find invincible champions in Milton and Locke.
Such was the age in which the work of English colonization in America was beginning. In looking for the origins of liberal thought in America, it is chiefly with English-speaking America that we are concerned. The Spanish mind, indeed, felt strongly the stimulus of the maritime discoveries and the contact with strange races of men, until an age of chivalrous enterprise bloomed forth in the literature of Calderon and Lope de Vega and Cervantes; but the new spirit was not strong enough to prevail over an ecclesiastical organization that had been growing in power since the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life of Spain perished in the fires of the Inquisition, and art and song failed to lead the way to science and free thought; no Spanish Locke or Newton followed in the train of a Lope and a Murillo, but so lately as the year 1771 the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the law of gravitation as discordant with revealed religion.[18]With such a state of things in the mother country, liberal thought in the Spanish colonies was a plant of very slow growth. As for France at the end of the sixteenth century, there was a sturdy intellectual life there which no efforts of tyranny could more than partially repress; but circumstancesthrew the work of colonization into the hands of the Jesuits, and accordingly the history of New France, while eminent for devoted bravery and heroic endurance, shows scarcely a trace of liberal thinking either in politics or in matters pertaining to religion. Not with the French and Spanish portions of America, therefore, but with the colonies that developed into the United States, is our inquiry concerned.
The first and most obvious consideration which strikes us is that while the two centuries following the discovery of America witnessed an unprecedented awakening of the European mind, yet it was only with those nations that had retained self-government that this intellectual awakening was to come to prompt and full fruition. From the British islands and the Netherlands came the kind of public policy that allowed free thinking to take deep root and send up a thrifty tree of liberty. The planting of such seed in the spacious virgin soil of the New World was doubtless the greatest of all the manifold unforeseen results for which Columbus opened the way. It made political freedom the strongest power on earth, and thus favoured the attainment of that equable flexibility of mind which allows the thought to play freely about the facts which are laid before it. Not ina moment was such a grand result achieved; its complete realization has not yet come, and none of us may live to see it, yet toward that goal the whole impetus of men's civilizing work is tending, and there is no power that can prevent the consummation. Year by year, no matter how grave the questions with which we have to deal, we are becoming more and more able to let our minds play freely with them, to turn them hither and thither till all sides be seen and all aspects duly considered.
Not all in a moment, I say, has such a desirable result been achieved. So far is it, moreover, from having been brought about by conscious human effort that mankind have in general struggled desperately against it. Compared with the mass of men, it is only a few minds that have learned to regard absolute freedom of thought as something to be desired. Though the colonization of America came at a time when men's minds were stirred by novel ideas as never before, though the men of that generation were moving irrepressibly toward liberality of thought, yet there were very few who had any liking for liberal thought, or any good word to bestow upon it. There were few who doubted that absolute truth was attainable concerning the most abstruse questions of philosophyand religion, and an exactly true belief on minute points of theology was deemed necessary for one's personal salvation. Changes in opinion simply wrought a transfer of allegiance from one orthodoxy to another, and the new orthodoxy felt bound as much as the old one to persecute all who refused such allegiance. From this point of view the history of the progress of liberal thought becomes curiously interesting, for it shows how one of the most momentous revolutions in human life has steadily gone on in spite of the inveterate antagonism of the very men concerned in bringing it about! To a considerable extent, the history has been the same over a large part of the globe. The causes which have been at work in America have also been at work in Europe, and even beyond; and the liberal thought with which we are familiar is characteristic not so much of America as of the latter part of the nineteenth century. But along with the general causes there have been local causes which have especially concerned the New World, and a clear account of the matter requires us to indicate both the one and the other.
From the revolt of Henry VIII. against the Papacy down to the Revolution of 1688, there was in England a progressive movement toward liberal thought. It was at first a crude unconscious movementin the direction of toleration, which is a necessary condition for the development of free thinking. When we have arrived at a truly cordial toleration of opinions, allowing to all free play to stand or fall, just as hypotheses in science are suffered to stand or fall, then is men's thought for the first time really untrammelled. Whatever, therefore, tended toward toleration of diverse forms of creed or worship was a step in the path that led to free thinking; and whatever tended to democratize the church and relieve it from state control was a step toward toleration. The revolt of Henry VIII. at first but realized what theprœmunirestatutes of Edward I. and Edward III. had threatened. But by breaking up the religious orders, expelling abbots from Parliament, and making the headship of the church a subject of fierce dispute, it contributed immensely to weaken and relax the bonds of conservatism, and it afforded a rare opportunity for the thoughts of laymen and small preachers to assert themselves. Thus the Lollardism which had been partially suppressed for more than a century now reared its head again defiantly, and, after learning lessons in democracy from Calvin, came forth as Puritanism, clad in full panoply for one of the world's most fateful contests.
In the course of Elizabeth's reign we find this Puritanism taking three different shapes. There were the moderate reformers, whose wish was simply to trim and prune the tree of Episcopacy; and secondly, those who were afterward known as "root and branch" men, whose name is descriptive enough. Instead of pruning they would uproot the tree and cast it away. To these Presbyterians the royal supremacy was no more than the papal a part of the living growth of Christ's church; it was but stubble fit for burning. Kings looked with horror upon such views, which threatened political danger no less than ecclesiastical. "A Scottish presbytery," cried James I., "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings." The case could not have been more pithily stated, yet even Presbyterianism stopped short of full-fledged democracy. For Jack and his friends, by means of synods and general assemblies, could create a governing body with power of enforcing conformity upon unwilling congregations. In protest against this somewhat oligarchical method, Puritanism assumed its third form, that of Independency. The beginnings of Independency are to be sought among the Brownistsof Elizabeth's reign, though their day of glory first came with the Civil War. In the theory of the Independents, as fully developed, any group of persons wishing to worship God in common might come together and organize themselves into a Congregational church, existing by as good a warrant as any other church, and entirely free from the control of any bishop, or synod, or council. No outside power could prescribe its creed or interfere with its ceremonial. Each church became, therefore, a little self-governing republic, as completely autonomous as an ancient Greek city, and the union of such churches was based solely upon the spirit of spontaneous Christian fellowship. Such was the theory of Independency.
In these successive stages of Protestantism we may see the preliminary steps toward general toleration and toward liberal thought. In each stage the strength of the coercive power that could be exercised over men's opinions and expressions of opinion was sensibly diminished. From the coercive power of the universal Church, which had once been able to direct a crusade against the Albigenses, it was a long step downward to the coercive power of Queen Elizabeth, whose will to suppress Puritanism was perpetually held in checkby motives of public policy. It was a yet further step downward from the coercive power of a sovereign to that of a synod, and thence again to that of a congregation. So striking is the progress that one who knew nothing of history might easily mistake the theory of Independency as providing practically for something like complete toleration. History tells us that this was far from being the case. Heresy, or dissent from the commonly accepted orthodoxy, has been no more tolerated in Independent churches than elsewhere; and even in the absence of serious differences in dogma, persecution has been visited upon divergences from the customary ritual, as for example in the treatment long accorded to Baptists. In their militant days, neither Presbyterianism nor Independency ever professed to be tolerant. The gravest reproach they could imagine was to be charged with encouraging free thinking. The eminent Scottish divine Rutherford gave expression to the prevailing sentiment when he declared, "We regard toleration of all religions as not far removed from blasphemy." Nevertheless, the movement which gave rise to Presbyterianism and to Independency was sure to advance to the announcement of the principle of universal toleration. That movement was itself the expression of a vast amount of free thinking,and it was not to stop short of recognizing the claims of free thought. The century that witnessed the beginnings of an English-speaking America saw also the genuine principles of toleration laid down by Roger Williams and William Penn, and demonstrated with resistless wealth of learning and logic by Milton and Locke.
In an account of the origins of liberal thought in America this English development is all-important, but it does not cover the whole field. America's inheritance from Europe comes chiefly, but not entirely, from the British islands. In the early days of the Protestant Reformation, there were European countries in which religious toleration had advanced practically much further than in England. The England of Henry VIII. as compared with the Netherlands was in a crude and backward condition. The contrast might be likened to that between rural life with its narrow mental horizon and the varied cosmopolitan life of the city. England politically was a land of unrivalled promise, but she was not quite abreast with the most advanced culture of the time. Her government was mainly in the hands of country gentlemen, who lacked some valuable elements of experience that were possessed by the burghers of commercial Antwerp and Ghent. A carefulsurvey of the Middle Ages shows plainly an abiding antagonism between commerce and the ecclesiastical spirit. A general connection between the predominance of international trade and the secularization of public life is distinctly traceable. On the map of mediæval Europe one may point out peculiar spots where the Papacy never gained complete sway. In some of these, as in Bohemia and southern Gaul, the resistance was due to Manichæan heresies brought in from the Eastern Empire, giving rise to a kind of mediæval Puritanism; in these we do not find a spirit of liberal thought developed, but rather an anti-Catholic fanaticism. The other peculiar spots lie in the great pathway of commerce between the Levant and the northern seas. In the free cities of northern Italy and southern Germany, in the Hansa towns, and in the Netherlands, priestcraft had less sway than elsewhere, and the general tone of thought was more liberal and modern. No city came so completely under the secularizing influences of maritime commerce as Venice; and it is significant that the Papacy, at the very pinnacle of its power and arrogance in the thirteenth century, utterly failed in its attempt to force the Inquisition upon that republic of merchants.
In similar wise, we find the commercial Netherlandsin the sixteenth century exhibiting practically such toleration in matters of religion as the British islands attained only much later, and after prolonged and distressing struggle. From the time of Edward III. commercial intercourse with the great Dutch and Flemish cities was one of the most potent civilizing influences at work in England. It was a liberalizing influence in religion and in politics, and must be named among the causes which made the eastern counties preëminent for heresy. In later days, when the Dutch provinces had saved their Protestantism and recovered political freedom, they adopted a policy of toleration so broad as to seem to most contemporaries very eccentric. Their noble country was stigmatized as "the common harbour of all heresies" and a "cage of unclean birds." How it harboured heretics escaping from England is something that no American is ever likely to forget.
If, after this glance at European conditions, we cross the Atlantic and observe the group of twelve colonies that were planted during the seventeenth century, we find that five of them were especially notable for pursuing from the outset a policy of toleration,—a policy favourable to liberal thought. These five, naming them in order of seniority, were New Netherland, Maryland, Rhode Island, andPennsylvania, with Delaware. In New Netherland the Dutch simply maintained their traditional secularized policy. On the hospitable island of Manhattan all the varieties of European religion met on terms of equality,—Lutherans and Catholics, Quakers[19]and Puritans, Moravians and Jews. After the English conquest this liberal policy was continued by the bigoted Duke of York, for reasons similar to those which made toleration a necessity in the province of the liberal and sagacious Calverts. The Catholic proprietors of Maryland wished to make their province a desirable home for Catholics who were inclined to leave England, and the only possible way of accomplishing this, without interference from the British government, was to pursue a policy broad enough to include Catholics along with all other kinds of Christians in its benefits. A similar necessity confronted Charles II. and James II. In order to secure as much protection as possible for Catholics without interference from Parliament, it was necessary to pursue a policy broad enough to include Quakers along with Catholics. For such reasons James refrained from disturbing the liberal Dutchpolicy in New York. For such reasons both Stuart kings supported the schemes of William Penn, in whose proprietary colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware the principles of toleration were carried out, on the whole, more completely than anywhere else in English-speaking America. It is interesting in this connection to observe that the mother of William Penn was a Dutch lady, though perhaps it is possible to make too much of such a fact. The Quakers, who formed the strength of the colony, represented a phase of Puritanism more liberal than Independency. As contrasted with Independency, Quakerism was a notable advance in the direction of Individualism; it had outgrown the set of notions according to which a civic community ought to consist of a united body of believers. Pennsylvania, therefore, and its appendage Delaware, profited by the late date at which they were founded; they represented a more advanced stage of opinion than the colonies which started in the time of James I. Their proprietary government remained undisturbed until the Declaration of Independence, and in 1776 these two states were the only ones in which all Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, stood socially and politically on an equal footing. For after the accession of William and Mary had madethe Episcopal Church supreme in New York and Maryland, the Catholic inhabitants of those colonies were disfranchised and made the subject of various oppressive enactments. Even the laws of Rhode Island, as first printed, early in the eighteenth century, expressly prohibit Roman Catholics from voting. The date of this statute is not accurately known, but it was certainly between 1688 and 1705,[20]and may be due to the strong antagonism aroused by the conduct of James II. and his Jacobites. However that may be, the statute was not repealed until 1784.
The disfranchisement of Catholics was contrary to the spirit of the Rhode Island charter and to the views of Roger Williams, who certainly understood the rational grounds for religious toleration better than any other man of his time, save perhaps Milton and Vane. He represents the Protestant principle of the sacred right of private judgment carried out with unflinching logical consistency. In him the transition from Independency to Individualism is completed. The contrast between the two is illustrated in the controversy between Williams and Cotton which was called forth by the publication in 1644 of Williams's book entitled "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution."John Cotton was a typical Independent, and by no means a man of persecuting temperament, but his view of the matter is extremely one-sided. He admits that it is wrong for error to persecute truth, but he holds it to be the sacred duty of truth to persecute error! Williams, on the other hand, sees that truth stands in no need of violent or artificial support, and that error contains within itself the seeds of death. He feels, too, that when I venture to persecute what I call error in others, I virtually assume my own infallibility. Thus not until pure Individualism is reached is the fundamental fallacy of Catholicism escaped. In order to protect this sacred Individualism, Williams would have a complete separation between church and state. Under no pretext whatever should the civil government interfere with religious matters. There should be no more statutes against heresy or heretics, no enforced attendance upon public worship, no support of churches by taxation. Roger Williams not only proclaimed such doctrines, but he lived up to them. He never took pains to conceal his dislike of Quaker doctrines; in his seventy-third year he once rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett Bay, in order to conduct a dispute against three valiant Quaker champions; yet, inspite of vehement pressure from the neighbouring colonies, he resolutely refused to allow the civil power of Rhode Island to be used against Quakers. Massachusetts in fury threatened to cut off the trade of the weaker colony, but nothing could intimidate Williams into what he termed "exercising a civil power over men's consciences." Among the public men of the seventeenth century Roger Williams deserves a preëminent place; he was the first to conceive thoroughly and carry out consistently, in the face of strong opposition, a theory of religious liberty broad enough to win assent and approval from advanced thinkers of the present day.
The separation of church from state, which was effected with such remarkable success in the founding of Rhode Island, did not become general in the United States until after the winning of independence. On this issue the eighteenth century had its memorable struggle, in which the protagonist was Virginia, and the victory was achieved under the leadership of Jefferson and Madison. The early policy of Virginia was to drive out dissentients, or subject them to civil disabilities; and of the Puritans who went thither for a while the greater part left the colony, many of them retreating into tolerant Maryland. After 1660, for three generationsthe Episcopal folk had it all their own way. But about 1720 began the wholesale immigration of Presbyterians and Lutherans into the Shenandoah Valley, and after the middle of the century trouble began when the tide-water Cavaliers tried to impose taxes upon these people for the support of the Established Church. The most numerous and powerful opponents of this narrow policy were the Presbyterians; and inasmuch as these had come, not from Scotland where their own church was established, but from Ireland where it was persecuted, their experience had led them to approve the separation of church from state. Their political notions were also strongly democratic, and with the aid of their votes Jefferson's party not only abolished primogeniture and entail and other old English customs, but also carried the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church in Virginia. Madison's Religious Freedom Act of 1785, which not only effected this, but likewise did away with all religious tests, is a very important event in the history of the United States. The statute, which declared that "opinion in matters of religion shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect civil capacities," attracted attention far and wide; it was translated into several European languages, and published with admiring comments; and in the course of thenext forty years it was imitated by one state after another, until all over the land religious freedom came to bealmostas complete as legislation could make it. The qualifying adverb is still needed; for, by the constitutions of Pennsylvania and Tennessee, no man can hold office unless he believes in God and a future state of rewards and punishments; in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, the two Carolinas, and Maryland, belief in God is required; and in Arkansas and Maryland a man who does not believe in God and a future state of retribution is deemed incompetent as a witness or juror.[21]Such curiosities of law-making—survivals from a lower state, like the caudal vertebra in man and the higher apes—are common enough in history.
The various stages here mentioned in the progress toward religious toleration, and toward the separation of church and state, are important symptoms of the progress of liberal thought. Of course Madison's Religious Freedom Act could not have been proposed by an Endicott, or sustained by a community that would not endure the presence of Baptists or Quakers. The sketch here given shows an enormous advance in liberal thought in the course of two centuries and a half. But such asurvey is far from telling us the whole story. A further inquiry into causal agencies is needed, and the best field for it is furnished by that theocratic Puritanism which cast out Roger Williams,—the Puritanism of the four confederated New England colonies, and especially of Massachusetts. No one can deny that in Massachusetts, during the nineteenth century, liberal thought has advanced further and has permeated the community more thoroughly than in any other state of the American Union. For at least three generations the intellectual ferment upon which liberal thought in the United States has thriven has come chiefly from Massachusetts. Yet among our colonies which attained social maturity during the seventeenth century there was none which made such emphatic exhibitions of intolerance and bigotry as Massachusetts. She was as clearly and avowedly founded upon an illiberal principle as Rhode Island was founded upon a principle of liberality. The Endicott type of mind is the very antipodes of the Roger Williams type; yet it was in the land of Endicott, and in a congenial soil, that Theodore Parker lately flourished. Whence came so great a change? The answer will remind us that there are two sources from which liberal thought is nourished. The one is the secularized Gallio spirit that deemsit folly to interpose obstacles in the way of the natural working of reason and common sense; the other is the intense devotion to spiritual ideals which, in spite of all inherited encumbrances of bigotry and superstition, never casts off its allegiance to reason as the final arbiter. The former spirit is of vast use in the world, although its tendency is to deaden into mere worldliness as typified in a Franklin; the latter spirit may commit many an error, but its drift is toward light and stimulus and exaltation of life as typified in an Emerson. In the darkest days of New England Puritanism the paramount allegiance to reason was never lost sight of; and out of this fact came the triumph of free thinking, although no such result was ever intended.
The aims of the Puritans who settled in New England were not all alike, but one dominant aim with many was the founding of a commonwealth in which church and state should be identified, somewhat after the pattern of the old Hebrew theocracy. To this end the suffrage in Massachusetts and New Haven was limited to persons qualified to receive the sacrament in Congregational churches. This Massachusetts idea was never adopted by Plymouth, and the founding of Connecticut was at least in part a liberal protestagainst it. In New Haven it was soon suppressed by the act of Charles II. which put an end to the separate existence of the colony. In Massachusetts, where this theocratic policy prevailed for half a century, the result was the growth of an unenfranchised class which came to include four fifths of the community. During the first generation, when the policy was administered by broad-minded, sagacious men like Winthrop and Cotton, its evils were not flagrant. But after 1650, with such fanatics as Norton and the aged Endicott at the helm, it soon became evident that the rulers were at variance on many points with the mass of the people. This was shown with glaring force in the Quaker persecution, when the violence of Endicott's party produced a popular reaction of feeling, which enabled the Quakers to carry their point and remain in the colony in defiance of statutes. It was further shown in the Half-way Covenant and the founding of the Old South Church in 1669, as parts of a movement toward extending the suffrage; and again in the rise of the Tory party under the lead of Joseph Dudley, opposed to the pretensions of the clergy. The magnificent work of the Massachusetts theocracy in resisting the crown throughout the whole reign of Charles II. can never be forgotten. Nothingwas ever done in America that contributed more toward the maintenance of political freedom. But in spite of its merits, the faults of the theocracy were such that we cannot regret its speedy overthrow. When that overthrow was effected, by the charter of 1692, there were a great many people in Massachusetts more or less hostile to the kind of Puritanism entertained by their grandfathers, and thus prepared for a more liberal mental habit. There was also a marked secularization of thought, a diminution of interest in theological problems, and a deadening of religious zeal. A wonderful series of changes was set on foot by the writings and preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and the group of revivals between 1735 and 1750 known as "the Great Awakening." Few figures in history are more pathetic or more sublime than that of Jonathan Edwards in the lonely woodlands of Northampton and Stockbridge, a thinker for depth and acuteness surpassed by not many that have lived, a man with the soul of a poet and prophet, wrestling with the most terrible problems that humanity has ever encountered, with more than the courage and candour of Augustine or Calvin, with all the lofty inspiration of Fichte or Novalis. An interesting historical essay might be devoted to tracing the effects wrought upon New Englandby this giant personality. The Great Awakening, in which he took part, and to which his preaching powerfully contributed, revived the popular interest in theological questions, disencumbered of the ever present political implications of the previous century. In many ways his theories acted as a disintegrating solvent upon the beliefs of the time. For example, the prominence which he gave to spiritual conversion, or what was called "change of heart," brought about the overthrow of the doctrine of the Half-way Covenant. It also weakened the logical basis of infant baptism, and led to the winning of hosts of converts by the Baptists. Moreover, the uses to which Edwards put his doctrine of the will produced a reaction toward Arminianism, which not only affected the teachings of the Baptists, but predisposed many persons to join in the wave of Methodism which was just about to sweep over the country. A similar reaction against Edwards's views of divine justice, reinforced by some first faint inklings of Biblical criticism, pointed the way toward Universalism. Still more, the discussions aroused by Edwards's speculations on original sin and the atonement began to undermine the doctrine of the Trinity and prepare men's minds for the Unitarian movement. No such results would have been possible save ina country where education was universal and the Sunday sermon a favourite theme of discussion. Sooner or later, the perpetual appeal to reason, with the familiar use of metaphysical arguments and citations of Scripture, must lead to novelties of doctrine and to negative criticism; while for the education of the popular intelligence nothing could be more effective. In seventeenth-century Puritanism, therefore, in spite of its rigid narrowness, there were latent the speculations of an Edwards, the further conclusions to which some of them were pushed, the reactions against them, the keen edge of the critical faculty in New England, and much of the free thinking of a later age.
In the course of the eighteenth century some influence was doubtless exercised in America by the English deists, and at the very end of the century by Thomas Paine. There is no reason to suppose that any appreciable effect was produced by the atheism of the French encyclopædists, which was mainly a reaction, largely emotional and aided by the shallowest of metaphysics, against the effete ecclesiastical system in France. It was too remote from American ideas to exert much influence here. The deism of Voltaire found a few scattered admirers. A quiet religion of humanity, which set little store by miracles, or abstruse doctrines,or the divine authority of Scripture, was held by a number of eminent persons of strong prosaic common sense and feeble spirituality, among whom may be named Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams. This phase of free thought was of considerable importance, but the dominant influence in New England down to the rise of the transcendental movement was that which could be traced back to Edwards.
In the early part of the present century, the most advanced phase of liberal thought, represented by the Unitarians in Massachusetts, was trying to hold an utterly untenable position, halfway between narrow orthodoxy and untrammelled free thinking, when the ground began to be cut from under it by the transcendentalists, whose native temperaments, not wanting in kinship with that of Edwards, were stimulated by a brief contact with Kantian and post-Kantian speculation in Germany. In Emerson's poetic soul the result was a seminal influence upon high thinking, in America and in the Old World, the power of which we cannot but feel, but which it is as yet too soon to estimate. In the middle of the century some wholesome destructive work still needed to be done, and it was well done. When German criticism, with the other weapons in the powerful handsof Theodore Parker, freed us from the spectre of bibliolatry, it might indeed be said that the promise of the Protestant Reformation was at length fulfilled. The change wrought in the Unitarian church since Parker began his preaching has been to some extent followed by analogous changes in other churches. On every side, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has been preëminently the age of the decomposition of orthodoxies. Here and there and everywhere they are crumbling into ruins; and as the world has long since left behind the age of trilobites and the age of dinosaurs, so in the world to which we are coming there will be neither a place nor a use for orthodoxies.
For, as I must observe in conclusion, there is all about us a resistless and world-wide influence at work, to which all the temporary and local causes I have mentioned have been but the ministering servants. 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. By this enlarged experience our minds are affected, from day to dayand from year to year, in more ways than we can detect or enumerate. It opens our minds to some notions, and makes them incurably hostile to others; so that, for example, new truths well-nigh beyond comprehension, like some of those connected with the luminiferous ether, are accepted, and old beliefs once universal, like witchcraft, are scornfully rejected. Vast changes in mental attitude are thus wrought before it is generally realized. Into the new scheme of things old beliefs no longer fit, and are therefore thrown aside and forgotten. Now our orthodoxies are of older date than the goodly fabric of modern knowledge. They are the outcome of more primitive and childlike thinking, they have ceased to fit the world as we know it, and therefore they fade and fall away from us, in spite of all our efforts to retain undisturbed the venerable and hallowed associations. In this inevitable struggle there has always been more or less pain, and hence free thought has not usually been popular. It has come to our life feast as a guest unbidden and unwelcome; but it has come to stay with us, and already proves more genial than was expected. Deadening, cramping finality has lost its charm for him who has tasted of the ripe fruit of the tree of knowledge. In this broad universe of God's wisdom and love, not leashes torestrain us are needed, but wings to sustain our flight. Let bold but reverent thought go on and probe creation's mysteries, till faith and knowledge "make one music as before, but vaster."
October, 1895.