THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



SEPTEMBER, 1891. 



THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION: ITS SCOPE AND 



INFLUENCE.* 



Bt JOHN FISKE. 



IF you take up almost any manual or compendium of history 

 written before the middle of the present century, you will gen- 

 erally find it to be a lifeless catalogue of events, and more likely 

 than not an undiscriminating catalogue in which important and 

 trivial events are jumbled together in utter obliviousness of any 

 such thing as historical perspective. Of great and admirable 

 books of history there were indeed many by illustrious writers of 

 ancient and modern times, in which the men, the measures, and 

 the social features of particular epochs were portrayed with life- 

 like reality and often illustrated and criticised with a wealth of 

 practical wisdom. But the insight into the underlying causes and 

 the general drift of the endlessly complicated mass of human af- 

 fairs was dim and uncertain, and of the essential unity of history, 

 the solidarity in the multifarious career of mankind, there was 

 hardly a suspicion. Three great books in narrative form, which 

 reached out toward a presentation of the unity of history, may be 

 cited in illustration of the difficulty under which all such attempts 

 necessarily labored in the absence of such broad scientific concep- 

 tions as have been gained only within recent times. Bossuet's Dis- 

 course on Universal History was a work of noble design ; but, be- 

 ing necessarily limited by the narrow theology of the time, it 

 could only see the vast importance of the work of the Hebrew 

 race, and, seeing no further, could not properly estimate even this ; 

 while as for any appreciation of natural causes, its perpetual ap- 

 peal to the miraculous made anything of the sort quite impossible. 

 In Voltaire's Essay on the Manners and Morals of Nations there 



*Address before the Brooklyn Ethical Association, May 31, 1891. 

 vol. xxxix. 41 



