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Mr. Fiske’s presentation of the meaning of infancy

Because of the fundamental importance of Mr. Fiske’s presentation of “the doctrine of the meaning of infancy,” his views are here reprinted in detail. The material consists of an essay and an address. The first of these, “The Meaning of Infancy,” is a brief and simplified restatement of those theories of man’s origin and destiny as first suggested in his lectures at Harvard University in 1871, and later developed more fully in the “Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy,” part II, chapters xvi, xxi, and xxii. The second of these, “The Part played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man,” is an address delivered by Mr. Fiske as the guest of honor at a dinner at the Aldine Club, New York, May 13, 1895. Together these two papers constitute the most detailed and valuable elucidation of the doctrine that we possess. In offering them to the teaching profession and the reading public in this form, it is with the sincere hope that this biological interpretation of childhood and education will lend a new spiritual dignity to the whole institution of education. It must certainly be gratifying to those who are profound believers in the efficacy of education, to note that its significance is wider than its service to particular persons and states; that education is, in truth, the conscious and latest mode of that wider world-evolution which has been in progress since the beginning of time.

I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY

What is the Meaning of Infancy? What is the meaning of the fact that man is born into the world more helpless than any other creature, and needs for a much longer season than any other living thing the tender care and wise counsel of his elders? It is one of the most familiar of facts that man alone among animals, exhibits a capacity for progress. That man is widely different from other animals in the length of his adolescence and the utter helplessness of his babyhood, is an equally familiar fact. Now between these two commonplace facts is there any connection? Is it a mere accident that the creature which is distinguished as progressive should also be distinguished as coming slowly to maturity, or is there a reason lying deep down in the nature of things why this should be so? I think it can be shown, with very few words, that between these two facts there is a connection that is deeply in-wrought with the processes by which life has been evolved upon the earth. It can be shown that man’s progressiveness and the length of his infancy are but two sides of one and the same fact; and in showing this, still more will appear. It will appear that it was the lengthening of infancy which ages ago gradually converted our forefathers from brute creatures into human creatures. It is babyhood that has made man what he is. The simple unaided operation of natural selection could never have resulted in the origination of the human race. Natural selection might have gone on forever improving the breed of the highest animal in many ways, but it could never unaided have started the process of civilization or have given to man those peculiar attributes in virtue of which it has been well said that the difference between him and the highest of apes immeasurably transcends in value the difference between an ape and a blade of grass. In order to bring about that wonderful event, the Creation of Man, natural selection had to call in the aid of other agencies, and the chief of these agencies was the gradual lengthening of babyhood.

Such is the point which I wish to illustrate in few words, and to indicate some of its bearings on the history of human progress. Let us first observe what it was then lengthened the infancy of the highest animal, for then we shall be the better able to understand the character of the prodigious effects which this infancy has wrought. A few familiar facts concerning the method in which men learn how to do things will help us here.