COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES THE n ITS METHOD AND ITS RELATION TO THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES JAMES O. WELLING, LL.D. PRESIDENT OF THE COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR OP THE PHILOS- OPHY OF HISTORY IN THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY PRESS JUDD & DETWEIIyKR PRINTERS TO THR SCIRNTIPIC SOCIETIES OF WASHINGTON WASHINGTON, D. C. 1894 The Columbian University, WASHINGTON, D. C. 1, The University publishes in this form the results of original inquiry or independent research. 2, This paper was read as an Inaugural Address at the opening of the School of Graduate Studies in the Columbian University, on the i6th of October, 1893, and is here published as a Study of Outlines in Universal History. 3, The University assumes no responsibility for expressions of individual opinion contained in Studies published under its auspices. 4, All publications of the University are kept on sale at prices varying with the cost of publication. 5, All communications relating to the purchase of publications should be addressed to The Treasurer of the Columbian University, Washington, D. C. The price of this publication is twenty-five cents per copy. THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY : lis Method and its Relation to the Physical Sciences. " Die TotaliU.i . er Erscheinungeii sind wir siclier zu unifassen, wenn wir sie uus uach R a u ni u n d Zeit geordnet deiiken, wenn wir sagen Natur und Geschichte." — Droysen. Since the days of Heracleitus, ihe Universe, with all that it con- tains, has been conceived as in a state of perpetual flux, and as there- fore having a history — a history of the fluxes, both quantitative and qualitative — which it has undergone in the process of Time. Sir Robert Ball tells us that by our telescopes and on our photographs we can discern something like one hundred million luminous stars, and that the visible stars do not form the hundredth, prob- ably not the thousandth, probably not even the millionth, part ' of the worlds which lurk unseen in the dark, un fathomed caves of the upper ocean. Each of these worlds has a history, if we could but know it. The solar s\stem has a history which the science of men is slowly spelling out. The round world which we inhabit has a history, and all the sciences, in the ascending scales of their suc- cessive evolution, combine to set that history in a framework of periodic times and of systematic ideas. Geology tells us ho\v our Mother Earth through long aeons of the primeval night-time was balancing and modulating the cosmic forces which were destined in the end to prepare a theatre for man. In Palaeontology we rehearse the story of epochs which have long since been surmounted, and move among the vanished forms of plants and animals which have long since j^erished from the face of the earth. "At the bottom of the ocean lie the mountains of former ages, on the summits of the Andes and Himalayas are the sands of ancient ocean-beds," while the ichthian and saurian monsters which lie sepulchred in those rock-ribbed pyramids have been described as the " mummied pha- raohs " of an extinct animal dynasty. The crystalline structures of our globe, themselves the result of a long historical process, have in I COLUMBIAN UNIVEHSITY STUDIES. turn been subjected to a thousand historical \ariations through the action of light and heat, of air and wind and water, of river denuda- tion, of earthquake shock, and of volcanic tremor. The sedentary formations washed down from the mountain slopes are a historic deposit. The vegetable mould had a long and dateless chronology before it was friable enough to be ploughed by earthworms, and Darwin has but pointed out in a scientific way the place which earthworms have in the economy of nature when he says that "it may be doubted whether there are man\- other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures. "^^ Even protoplasm, at the point where we examine it with our microscopes, is found to possess certain his- torical properties beyond and above its purely physical and chemi- cal constitution. Even germ-plasm, at the point where Weismann conceives it as the medium and ground of heredity, is held to have attained a definite architecture, which, for the time being, has be- come definite because it has been modified by being transmitted his- j:orically.f 1 Nature, says Coleridge, through the whole vast hierarchy of organic being, is "prophetic of man." After this prophecy had been ful- filled in the advent of man, there was a needs be that Jiiniia/! His- tory should come into the foreground, and should be esteemed as History in the highest sense of the term, because it marks the times and the stages of the perennial universal flux in tlie highest of all realms. It is because man is the "roof and crown of things" that History, in the truest as well as the highest sense of the term, becomes the record and the vehicle of ]iis achievements. The generations of men come and go like the leaves of the forest, as old Homer sings, but the race of man abides. ' The Science of Uni- versal History has for its object to impart unity to the collective consciousness of the race by arranging and rehearsing the main elements of that consciousness in the logical, because the chrono- logical, order of their evolution. 1 History is, therefore, the most comprehensive and at the same time the most distinctive form of knowledge. The connecting link between all the periods before man, it is the golden clasp which binds the fixed past of the human race to that undeveloped future which ever lies before it, while in "Darwin : Earthworms, p. 313. t Weismann : The Germ-plasm, pp. 3S-61. THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. 3 its chronicles of the living present it holds the nations under our ken in the very hour and article of their creative activities. What we may call the Formula of Evolution is to be seen today at its highest estate in the advancing columns of the most advanced civilizations. The work of Creation is still going on, and is going on today at the point of its highest ascension in the read- justments of the cosmic order of human society. The Tower of Babel is still building, and is building today wherever men are be- trayed by confusion of thought and purpose into confusion of speech. The rational life of man begins its pure and specific activity at the point where, for his highest needs, he can no longer find help from the instincts of his animal nature, and with each ad- vance in rationality he puts these instincts in a growing- circum- scription and confine, that he may the better live the higher life of reason. |l'he Science of Universal History is nothing more than an orderly and reasoned exposition of the rational activities under the pressure of which the human race has moved from stage to stage in the subjugation of nature and in the development of its distinctive rationality .J P'or this cause it is that the history of the present time lands the men of this generation, upon whom the ends of the world are come, in the very thick of the "evolutionary process." There was a time in the history of the solar system when the Formula of Evolution came to expression in the genesis of the planetary worlds ; at a later stage, in the genesis of the chemical elements; at a still later stage (and for our globe), in the genesis of plants and animals ; at still later stages, through the long cycles of geologic time, in the transformation of species, until at length we witness the arrival of man, endued with a psychical power to arrest the forces of natural selection and to substitute for them, in certain spheres and to a limited extent, an intellectual selection of his own devising. It is according to the measure of man's natural supremacy that the whole plant and animal kingdom is put under his sovereignty. In man, the centre of gravity of the whole evo- lutionary process is shifted from mechanic law to teleologic purpose, but to teleologic purpose working in the framework of mechanic law, and for this very reason working the more effectively because assured of the fixed conditions on which it can operate to purposes beyond and above mechanic law. The forces of a natural selection which once worked blindly on the animal side of man, for the differentiation of races, while as yet a conscious mental purpose 4 COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES. was feeble in the world, are now capable of being put in check on the physical side; and, on the basis of such arrested tendencies, a new order of evolution, working psychically, above and beyond these natural differentiations, is slowly bringing the men of varied races and tongues into a new species of moral and intellectual integration — an integration which, moving among the differential elements of civilized society, tends to assimilate them more and more into harmony with some predominant social synthesis. It is in the suc- cessive processes of the great moral and intellectual transformations which have been wrought in the civilization of the world, by a transmitted and hereditary culture, tliat the Science of Universal History finds its choicest subject-matter. What we may call the potential of civilization, at any given epoch, is to be determined for that epoch by marking the index of its collective culture, and by gauging the compulsive force which that collective culture impresses on the vast complex of forces comprised in i)olitical society. Each individual man, says a British philosoplier, is a microcosm of the whole intellectual and moral world, and, iintentially speak- ing, may be said to contain within hiaiself " an undeveloped in- finity of individuals ; " so that " each man is, in ])0ssibility, all men, and eacli life, renewed among other scenes, might be multi- plied into a history of the world."-'- In a word, eacli individual man, as he comes into the world, is destined to lead his highest life by virtue of his organic connection with the life of the whole human race, and it is the successive ex- pansions and over]ai)Sof this race-life, as witnessed in the i)rogress of man from savagery to barbarism, from l)arl)arism to the rudiments of civilization, and from tlie rudiments of civib'zation to the highest cul- minations whi<-h civilization has reached to-day, that tlie Science of Universal History aims to unfold in an orderly and a logical con- tinuity. In this way the calculus of universal history, working with the fixed points whicli mark the successive stages of the human race as it has moved along the ascending gradients of the world's culture, believes itself to be working with the factors of a positive knowledge in tentatively constructing from time to time tlie line and the lau- of the social evolution. The human mind, in the inosecution of scientific discovery, move^ along the lines of least resistance. The first sketch of the Science Allen Butler : Ancient IMiilosophy, vol. I, p. 46. thp: science of iniversal history. o of Universal History was laid in the world's moral order, not by accident (there are no accidents in universal history), but because the moral order, implicit in human society, especially in the lower stages of the social evolution, is more simple than the complicated mechani- cal order which is implicit in the physical world at the present stage of the physical evolution ; and the moral order of society is not only more simple than the physical order (which comes from afar, even from the foundation of the world), but it is also more directly ob- trusive on the reflective reason of man, as he lives and moves and has his being in civil society. The first expositors of the Universal Moral Order were the Prophets of Israel, who were the politicians as well as the religious guides of Israel. The moral order involved in the family, by virtue of its natural constitution, was proclaimed by them to be equally involved, mutatis vmtandic ivon. The Columbian University, WASHINGTON, D. C. SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES. THE FACULTY. JAMES C. WELLING, LL. D., President, Professor of the Philosophy of History. CHARLES E. MUNROE, S. B., Dean, Professor of Chemistry. The Rev. ADONIRAM J. HUNTINGTON, A. M., D. D., Professor of Greek. The Rev. SAMUEL M. SHUTE, A. M., D. D ,• Professor of EngUsh. ANDREW P. MONTAGUE, A. M., Ph. D., Professor of Latin. J. HOWARD GORE, B. S., Pn. D., Professor of Mathematics. LEE D. LODGE, A. M., Ph. D., Professor of French. D. KERFOOT SHUTE, A. B., M. D., Professor of Anatomy. FRANCIS R. FAYA, Jr., C. E., Professor of Civil Engineering. THEODORE N. GILL, M. D., Ph. D., Professor of Zoology. OTIS T. MASON, A. M., Ph. D., Lecturer on Anthropology. CLEVELAND ABBE, A. M., Ph. D., LL. D., Professor of Meteorology. HERMANN SCHONFELD, Ph. D., Professor of German. The Rev. J. MACBRIDE STERRETT, B. D., D. D., Professor of Philosophy. EDGAR FRISBY, A. M., U. S. N., Professor of Astronomy. WILLIAM C. WINLOCK, A. 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