history which is given in the Ideen, played an honorable and useful part.[1] But to make him out a Darwinian before Darwin, as some have done, or more generally, a chief discoverer of the evolutionary view of the world, is to obscure his real services by exaggerated praise.[2]
There remains the question of Fiske's indebtedness, or lack of indebtedness, to Herder. It is hardly possible that he was unacquainted with the Ideen. And in addition to the correspondence between their respective doctrines of infancy, analogies exist between Herder's religious speculations and the evolutionary theism which the American author worked out in his later writings. But here the suggestions of dependence end. The negative evidence, on the contrary, is very strong. There is great diversity in the use and application which the two philosophers make of the doctrine, beside differences of considerable magnitude between their formulations of the doctrine itself. Fiske's repeated accounts of his own authorship form a body of unimpeachable testimony which excludes the possibility of conscious derivation.[3] The hypothesis of unconscious influence encounters a difficulty whose importance is increased by its indirectness: the absence from Fiske's writings of allusions to Herder's system. Such allusions may indeed exist. But the present writer has been unable to discover examples of them either in Fiske's philosophical or his historical works. Whereas, if one author is working out his views under the inspiration of another, incidental references inevitably creep in to show the relation of his results to the thinking of his predecessor. The balance of probability, therefore, is markedly in favor of the theory of independent origination rather than of conscious derivation or even of unrealized indebtedness. Unless resemblance in doctrine be held in principle to prove dependence, the evidence warrants the conclusion that similar theories of human infancy were independently developed by two thinkers of different nationalities at dates separated by almost a century of intellectual progress.
| A. C. Armstrong. |
| Wesleyan University. |
- ↑ Cf. the writer's Transitional Eras in Thought, pp. 166-167.
- ↑ Cf. Von Bärenbach's Herder als Vorgänger Darwin's: "Alles, was zum innersten Kern der Theorie gehört, vom Kampf ums Dasein bis zur Urzelle finden wir deutlicher als in irgend einem Werke der vergangenen Zeiten in den 'Ideen' Herder's ansgesprochen" (p. 24).
- ↑ E.g., Cosmic Philosophy, Preface, p. viii (new ed.), Vol. IV, p. 161 ; A Century of Science, pp. iii-vii, 106. Cf. p. 59, note I above, and the first and third references to Royce in note 2.
