THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION: ITS 

 SCOPE AND INFLUENCE.* 



BY JOHN FISKE. 



IF you take up almost any manual or compendium of his- 

 tory written before the middle of the present century, you 

 will generally 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 affairs 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 pres- 

 entation 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 conceptions 

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

 Discourse on Universal History was a work of noble design ; 

 but, being 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 appeal to the miraculous made any- 

 thing of the sort quite impossible. In Voltaire's Essay on 

 the Manners and Morals of Nations there is a strong fore- 

 shadowing of the unity of history, but very slight practical 

 recognition of the differences between one stage of civiliza- 

 tion and another, and the philosophy of the book is quite too 

 much that of a sermon on the evils of priestcraft. In the 



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

 from the Popular Science Monthly, September, 1891, by permission of D. Apple- 

 ton & Co. Revised by the author. 



