Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/251

John Fiske . 233 salvation depend upon a change of heart in individual men — quite in the tradition of the Protestant theology which he had inherited. Fiske was not an original or a logically rigorous thinker, and his knowledge of the history of science and philosophy was by no means adequate; but he was a remarkably lucid, vigorous, and engaging writer who had no fear of repeating the same point. His Cosmic Philosophy went through sixteen editions, and this, as well as his other books, which sold by the thousands, undoubtedly exerted wide influence. Thus he greatly aided the spread of the Berkeleian argument that all we know of matter is states of consciousness, and at the same time of the argument (really inconsistent with this) for a psychical parallelism ac- cording to which matter and mind form parallel streams of causality without one causing the other. But above all, he made fashionable the evolutionary myth according to which everything has a function, evolves, and necessarily passes through certain stages. Thus he also introduced a new intel- lectual orthodoxy according to which the elect pride themselves on following the "dynamic" rather than the "static" point of / view. n/ The pietistic philosophy which gained complete control of f the American college and of dominant public opinion did not i completely break all communication between America and | foreign liberal thought as represented by Comte, Fourier, and even Proudhon, or by Bentham, Grote, and Mill. Even the 1 arch-skeptic Hume continued to be reprinted in this country; and the vitality of the sensualistic or quasi-materialistic tradi- tion in the medical profession is evidenced by James Rush's Analysis oj the Human Intellect (1865). Despite, however, the presence with us of men of such first-rate scientific eminence as Joseph Henry, Benjamin Peirce, or Nathaniel Bowditch, scientific thought was not sufficiently organized to demand a philosophy more in consonance with its own procedure. Even in Great Britain, where science was earlier and better organized by means of the Association for the Advancement of Science (1832), Mill's effort to revive and continue Hume's attempt to introduce the experimental method of natural sciences into mental and moral questions found acceptance very slowly. Toward the end of his life Mill testified that for one British