The Life and Letters of John Fiske, Volume 2Houghton Mifflin, 1917 John Fiske was not a voluminous correspondent; hence we have not many self-revealing letters to intimate friends and kindred thinkers, regarding his wrestling with some of the great themes which from time to time engaged his mind. The absence of these desirable data is, however, greatly minimized by the possession of his deeply interesting personal letters to his wife and his mother, and of his diaries in which the innermost feelings of his nature are disclosed. These, taken in connection with his published writings, enable us to make out quite a full record of his subjective activities, which, when considered in relation to the seething thought of the time as a stimulating objective environment, yield copious material for a "Life" of Fiske in both its unity and its variety. In the correspondence between Fiske and Spencer, and in the letters of Fiske describing Spencer, we get pleasanter impressions of Spencer's personality than from any other source. To the end, Fiske was thoroughly loyal to Spencer, while immensely broadening his philosophy; at the same time it must be admitted that Spencer withheld the public acknowledgment of indebtedness to Fiske which he so freely admitted privately. |
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Page 501 - ... full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth, and of India as an important portion of the same, should recognize the right of the Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations...
Page 8 - that every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle, with a force whose direction is that of the line joining the two, and whose magnitude is directly as the product of their masses, and inversely as the square of their distances from each other.
Page 423 - Strange, that the New World should have no better luck, — that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.
Page 6 - Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn, That he who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.
Page 313 - The materialistic assumption * * * that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy.
Page 33 - There exists a POWER, to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, of which all phenomena, as presented in consciousness, are manifestations, but which, we can know only through these manifestations.
Page 389 - France an undisputed title to our vast northwestern territories, and the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States in 1783...
Page 428 - In contemplating such a life as that of Las Casas, all words of eulogy seem weak and frivolous. The historian can only bow in reverent awe before a figure which is in some respects the most beautiful and sublime in the annals of Christianity since the Apostolic age. When now and then in the course of the centuries God's providence brings such a life into this world, the memory of it must be cherished by mankind as one of its most precious and sacred possessions. For the thoughts, the words, the deeds...
Page 255 - The age of the quadruped is to go out, the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
Page 76 - I made a something like the screech, for if I were to live a thousand years I should never forget it again.