Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/249

The Evolutionary Philosophy 231 of both English and Scottish writers, and their agnosticism, based on our supposed inability to know the infinite, had been common coin since the days of Kant. But the idea of universal evolution or development, though as old as Greek philosophy and fully exploited in all departments of human thought by Hegel, received a most impressive popular impetus from the work of Darwin and Spencer, and stirred the popular imagina- tion as few intellectual achievements had done since the rise of / the Copernican astronomy. Just as the displacement of man's abode as the centre of the universe led by way of compensation to a modern idealism which said "The whole cosmos is in our mind," so the discovery of man's essential kinship with brute creation led to the renewal of an idealistic philosophy which made human development and perfection the end of the cosmic process travailing through the aeons. Thus, instead of doing away with all teleology, the evolutionary philosophy itself became a teleology, replacing bleak Calvinism with the warm, rosy outlook of a perpetual and universal upward progress. This absorption of the evolutionary philosophy by theology is clearly brought out in the works of John Fiske (1842-1901). In his main philosophic work, the Outlines oj Cosmic Philosophy, which he delivered as lectures in Harvard in 1869-71, he fol- lowed Spencer so closely in his agnosticism and opposition to anthropomorphic theism that he brought down the wrath of the orthodox and made a permanent position for himself in the department of philosophy at Harvard impossible. Yet his own cosmic theism and his attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with that of a benevolent, omnipotent, quasi-psychical Power should have shown discerning theologians that here was a pre- cious ally. In his later writings Fiske, though never expressly withdrawing his earlier argument that the ideas of personality and infinity are incompatible, did emphasize more and more the personality of God; and his original contrast between cosmic and anthropomorphic theism reduced itself to a contrast between the immanent theology of Athanasius and the transcendent theology of St. Augustine. By making man's spiritual develop-|, ment the goal of the whole evolutionary process, Fiske replaced man in his old position as head of the universe even as in the days of Dante and Aquinas. What primarily attracted Fiske to the evolutionary philo-