36 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXrV. No. 863 



had indeed been preceded by another. The 

 recent forms of evolutionary doctrine, 

 those associated with the names of Darwin 

 and of Spencer, had be^n rapidly to come 

 into prominence about 1860. And the 

 decade from 1860 to 1870, taken together 

 with the opening years of the next decade, 

 had constituted what you may call the 

 storm and stress period of Darwinism, and 

 of its allied tendencies, such as those which 

 Spencer represented. In those years the 

 younger defenders of the new doctrines so 

 far as they appealed to the general public, 

 fought their battles, declared their faith, 

 out of weakness were made strong and put 

 to flight the armies of the theologians. 

 You might name, as a closing event of that 

 storm and stress period, Tyndall's famous 

 Belfast address of 1874, and the warfare 

 waged about that address. Haeekel's early 

 works, some of Huxley's most noted po- 

 lemic essays, Lange's "History of Ma- 

 terialism," the first eight or nine editions 

 of Von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the 

 Unconscious," are documents character- 

 istic of the more general philosophical in- 

 terests of that time. In our country, 

 Fiske's "Cosmic Philosophy" reflected 

 some of the notable features that belonged 

 to these years of the early conquests of 

 evolutionary opinion. 



Now in that storm and stress period, 

 James had not yet been before the pub- 

 lic. But his published philosophical work 

 began with the outset of the second and 

 more important period of evolutionary 

 thought — the period of the widening and 

 deepening of the new ideas. The leaders 

 of thought who are characteristic of this 

 second period no longer spend their best 

 efforts in polemic in favor of the main 

 ideas of the newer forms of the doctrine 

 of evolution. In certain of its main out- 

 lines — outlines now extremely familiar to 

 the public — they simply accept the notion 



of the natural origin of organic forms and 

 of the general continuity of the processes 

 of development. But they are concerned, 

 more and more, as time goes on, with the 

 deeper meaning of evolution, with the 

 study of its factors, with the application 

 of the new ideas to more and more fields 

 of inquiry, and, in case they are philos- 

 ophers, with the reinterpretation of philo- 

 sophical traditions in the light of what had 

 resulted from that time of storm and 

 stress. 



James belongs to this great second stage 

 of the evolutionary movement, to the 

 movement of the elaboration, of the widen- 

 ing and deepening of evolutionary 

 thought, as opposed to that early period 

 of the storm and stress. We still live in 

 this second stage of evolutionary move- 

 ment. James is one of its most inventive 

 philosophical representatives. He hardly 

 ever took part in the polemic in favor of 

 the general evolutionary ideas. Accepting 

 them, he undertook to interpret and apply 

 them. 



And now, secondly, the period of 

 James's activity is the period of the rise 

 of the new psychology. The new psychol- 

 ogy has stood for many other interests 

 besides those of a technical study of the 

 special sciences of the human and of the 

 animal mind. "What is technical about 

 psychology is indeed important enough. 

 But the special scientific study of mind by 

 the modern methods used in such study 

 has been a phase and a symptom of a very 

 much larger movement — a movement 

 closely connected with all that is most vital 

 in recent civilization, with all the modern 

 forms of nationalism, of internationalism, 

 of socialism, and of individualism. Hu- 

 man life has been complicated by so many 

 new personal and social problems, that 

 man has needed to aim, by whatever 

 means are possible, towards a much more 



