DISCUSSION.
HERDER AND FISKE ON THE PROLONGATION OF INFANCY.
Fiske's view of the prolongation of infancy in man is counted by others, as he himself considered it, his most distinctive contribution to evolutionary theory. In its earlier form it served to explain the socialization and moralization of man in contrast to the brute creation.[1] Later, as the religious side of Mr. Fiske's thinking became more prominent, it received new emphasis as a central element in his argument for theism and immortality.[2] The theory starts from a recognition of the change which came over the evolutionary process when natural selection began "to confine itself to psychical variations, to the neglect of physical variations." This necessitated a prolongation of the plastic period of infancy in order to the acquirement of functions whose complexity renders them impossible of attainment in the prenatal stage. The lengthened infancy, in turn, reacted on cerebral and intellectual development, and gave rise to psychical progress. In particular it furnished the occasion for the development of the parental feelings, and for the organization of the primitive social group, the family or clan. With the establishment of these the transition was effected from the gregariousness of the higher animals to the rudiments of human society. In them sympathy would develop and the control of individual action by ideal motives. Thus the beginnings of morality were implied in the primitive social organization and engendered by it,—the change from the form of evolution which is predominantly physical to psychical selection issuing in the genesis of results characteristic of man.
Of late years several writers have taken interest in noting anticipations of Fiske's view in the work of earlier times. In 1893 Professor, now President, Butler of Columbia University, pointed out one such in a fragment from Anaximander.[3] In this, as Dr. Butler showed, the
- ↑ Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Part II., chap, xvi, xxi-xxii. The doctrine had been suggested as early as 1871 in Fiske's lectures at Harvard (cf. Excursions of an Evolutionist, p. 306 note), and first published in the North American Review, October, 1873 (cf. A Century of Science, p. iv).
- ↑ Cf. Royce in the "Introduction" to the new edition of the Cosmic Philosophy, 1903, pp. lxxxi note, cvi, cxxii ff., cxxxvii-viii.
- ↑ "Anaximander on the Prolongation of Infancy in Man," read before the American Psychological Association, 1893; printed in Classical Studies in Honour of Henry Drisler, 1894, pp. 8-10.
