148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



was in the north that the abolition sentiment was so strong there in 

 the fifties. It was largely because in the eyes of New England Congre- 

 gationalism the black man had a soul, as, in the same sense and degree, 

 he could not have to the eyes of the presbyterianism and the episco- 

 palianism that were dominant in the south. 



The growth of individualism as a part of the political activities 

 originating at the close of the eighteenth century is so obvious and 

 so familiar as to come well within the common knowledge of every one, 

 but the contribution of science to this movement of thought in the 

 nineteenth century is not so easily apparent. The first significance 

 of the doctrine of evolution, the great contribution of biology to science 

 in the nineteenth century, was doubtless that of a lessening of the 

 dignity of man. The importance given to man in the expansion of 

 protestant theology, in which he was more and more pushed forward 

 to the honor of co-heir with Christ, was at once denied by implication 

 in the thinking of the followers of Darwin, A creature that had risen 

 out of the brute was very doubtfully filled with that divine essence 

 that made him rightfully a ruler of the universe equally with all other 

 men as being in the same degree with them one of the sons of God. 

 Science here, therefore, gave individualism no promise upon which it 

 could establish itself in the essential nature of man. On the other 

 hand, the Darwinian presentation of evolution as a process did furnish 

 such a premise in the process itself. It was through the struggle for 

 existence that man had come to be man. In this struggle it was some 

 quality or qualities of the individual that raised him above the mass 

 and kept the evolutionary process going forward. That understanding 

 of the nature of the forces that shape life for us transformed the 

 conceptions of the last century and put a new emphasis upon social 

 efficiency in the individual as the first element of progress. In the 

 United States all of these infiuences, the freedom of extreme protest- 

 antism in religion, the general doctrine of political and human equal- 

 ity, and the acceptance of the principle of evolution, have been more 

 free than elsewhere to combine in producing an extreme form of in- 

 dividualism. Of these several influences, however, the spirit of an 

 advanced protestantism seems to have been the most distinctive and 

 the most peculiarly active. 



It is as an ultimate product of the most liberal and progressive 

 religious thinking of the new world that Emerson is an individualist. 

 It is also, to be sure, as a philosopher working out in his own way a 

 transcendentalism that goes back to Kant, but the philosophy is so 

 deeply interpenetrated with religious feeling and is so largely turned 

 aside to religious uses that we may call it religion. Everywhere, how- 

 ever, it is the religion of the individual soul, a religion that finds its 

 support in an unfaltering faith in the worth of the individual. In 

 " Self-Reliance " he says : 



