sion of infancy, through a period of long years, proceeds at last
from the hearts which are subjected to its influence the noble thing
which we call altruism: love for others than ourselves and the other
high spiritual instincts which are the crown of human nature. The
recognition of the extension of infancy as the source from which in
our slow evolution comes the brightest thing in the universe
belongs to our own time. It is perhaps the climax of our philosophic
speculation. What more feeble than the snowflakes! But accumulated and
compressed they become the glacier which may carapace an entire zone
and determine its configuration into mountain and valley. What more
feeble than the feebleness of the babe! And yet that multiplied by the
million through aeons of time and over continents of space fashions
humanity after the sublime pattern shown on the Mount. If to John
Fiske belongs the credit of first recognising in the scheme of
evolution the significance of this mighty factor, the extension
of infancy (he himself so believed and I do not think it can be
questioned that he was the first to recognise it), what philosophic
thinker has to a greater extent laid the world in debt? This I shall
not further discuss. I am touching in these papers only upon light
and exterior things, nor am I competent to deal with philosophical
problems and controversies. John Fiske gave his strength to the
writing of history, where, too, there are controversies into which I
do not propose to enter. I will only say that I resent the account of
him which makes him to have been a mere populariser whose merit lies
solely or for the most part in the fact that, while appropriating
materials accumulated by others, he had only Goldsmith's faculty
of making them graceful and attractive to the mass of readers. His
philosophical instinct, on the other hand, discovered, as few writers
have done, the subtle links through which in history facts are related
to facts and are weighed wisely, in the protagonists, the motives and
qualities which make them foremost figures. He saw unerringly where
emphasis should be put, what should be salient, what subordinate. Too
many writers, German especially, perhaps, have the fault of "writing
a subject to its dregs," giving to the unimportant undue place. In
Fiske's estimation of facts there is no failure of proper proportion,
the great thing is always in the foreground, the trifle in shadow or
quite unnoticed. To do this