It would have been remarkable indeed if the intellectual ferment of the late nineteenth century had not affected contemporary ideas about the meaning of life, the truth of revealed religion, moral values, and similar fundamental problems. In particular the theory of evolution, so important in altering contemporary views of science, history, and social relations, produced significant changes in American thinking about religious and philosophical questions.
Evolution posed an immediate challenge to religion: If Darwin was correct, the biblical account of the creation was apparently untrue and the idea that the human race had been formed in God’s image was highly unlikely. A bitter controversy erupted, described by President Andrew D. White of Cornell in The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). While millions continued to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, among intellectuals, lay and clerical, victory went to the evolutionists because, in addition to the arguments of the geologists and the biologists, scholars were throwing light on the historical origins of the Bible, showing that its words were of human rather than divine inspiration.
Evolution did not undermine the faith of any large percentage of the population. If the account of the creation in Genesis could not be taken literally, the Bible remained a repository of wisdom and inspiration. Such books as John Fiske’s The Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874) provided religious persons with the comforting thesis that evolution, while true, was merely God’s way of ordering the universe—as the liberal preacher Washington Gladden put it, “a most impressive demonstration of the presence of God in the world.”
The effects of Darwinism on philosophy were less dramatic but in the end more significant. Fixed systems and eternal truths were difficult to justify in a world that was constantly evolving. By the early 1870s a few philosophers had begun to reason that ideas and theories mattered little except when applied to specifics.
“Nothing justifies the development of abstract principles but their utility in enlarging our concrete knowledge of nature,” wrote Chauncey Wright, secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This startling philosophy, known as pragmatism, was further developed by William James, brother of the novelist. James was one of the most remarkable persons of his generation. Educated in London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva—as well as at Harvard—he studied painting, participated in a zoological expedition to South America, earned a medical degree, and was a professor at Harvard, successively of comparative anatomy, psychology, and finally philosophy. His Principles of Psychology (1890) may be said to have established that discipline as a modern science. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which treated the subject from both psychological and philosophical points of view, helped thousands of readers reconcile their religious faith with their increasing knowledge of psychology and the physical universe.
James’s wide range and his verve and imagination as a writer made him by far the most influential philosopher of his time. He rejected the deterministic interpretation of Darwinism and all other one-idea explanations of existence. Belief in free will was one of his axioms; environment might influence survival, but so did the desire to survive, which existed independent of surrounding circumstances. Even truth was relative; it did not exist in the abstract but happened under particular circumstances. What a person thought helped to make thought occur, or come true. The mind, James wrote in a typically vivid phrase, has “a vote” in determining truth. Religion was true, for example, because people were religious.
Blows shattered the laissez-faire extremism of Herbert Spencer. In “Great Men and Their Environment” (1880) James argued that social changes were brought about by the actions of geniuses whom society had selected and raised to positions of power, rather than by the impersonal force of the environment. Such reasoning fitted the preconceptions of rugged individualists yet encouraged those dissatisfied with society to work for change. Educational reformers like John Dewey, the institutionalist school of economists, settlement house workers, and other reformers adopted pragmatism eagerly. James’s philosophy did much to revive the buoyant optimism that had characterized the pre-Civil War reform movement.
Yet pragmatism brought Americans face-to-face with somber problems. While relativism made them optimistic, it also bred insecurity, for there could be no certainty, no comforting reliance on any eternal value in the absence of absolute truth. Pragmatism also seemed to suggest that the end justified the means, that what worked was more important than what ought to be. At the time of James’s death in 1910, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle pointed out that the pragmatic philosophy was helpful to businessmen in making decisions. By emphasizing practice at the expense of theory, the new philosophy encouraged materialism, anti-intellectualism, and other unlovely aspects of the American character. And what place had conventional morality in such a system? Perhaps pragmatism placed too much reliance on the free will of human beings, ignoring their capacity for selfishness and self-delusion.
World History
