A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900

Carlton J. H. Hayes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION      ix

PREFACE                   xi

Chapter I                     POWER POLITICS IN THE WAKE OF NATIONAL WARS 1

I Aftermath of the Franco‑Prussian War; II Heritage of Material Progress and the Competitive Spirit; III Heritage of Darwinism and "the Struggle for Existence"; IV The European Powers; V The Armed Peace; VI The Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin; VII Alliances à trois: Peace by Might.

Chapter II                   THE FRUITION OF LIBERALISM            46

I Liberalism in the 1870's: Ecumenical and Sectarian; II The Vogue of Constitutional Parliamentary Government; III Social Classes and Political Parties; IV Temporary Predominance of Liberal Parties; V Sectarian Liberalism in Action in the '70's.

Chapter III                  THE RAPID MECHANIZING OF WORK AND THOUGHT 88

I Perfecting of Mechanical Transport; II Growth of Machine Industry and the Crisis in Agriculture; III Growth of Material Wealth and Corporate Business; IV Growth of Urban Population and the Great Migrations; V Medical Progress and Public Health; VI Mechanistic Natural Science; VII Deterministic Biological Science; VIII Physiological Psychology; IX Positivism and the Social Sciences.

Chapter IV                  RELIGION AND THE ARTS DURING THE GENERATION OF MATERIALISM                     123

I "Warfare between Science and Theology"; II The Drift away from Traditional Religion and the Rise of Modernism; III Pontificate of Leo XIII; IV Christian Missionary Enterprise; V Sociological Realism in Art; VI Psychological Realism; VII Impressionism and Eclecticism.

[v/vi]

Chapter V                   EMERGENCE OF THE MASSES

I Trade‑Unionism; II The Co‑operative Movement; III Popular Education; IV Popular journalism; V Marxian Socialism; VI Beginnings of Feminism.            165

Chapter VI                  RESURGENCE OF ECONOMIC NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL IMPERIALISM

I Reaction against Doctrinaire Liberalism in the 1880's; II Return to Tariff Protection; III Socializing Legislation; IV Bases of a New National Imperialism; V Res Gestae of the New Imperialism; VI The New Navalism.            196

Chapter VII                 SEED‑TIME OF TOTALITARIAN NATIONALISM

I Planters and Cultivators; II Favorable Soil and Climate; III Racialism and Anti‑Semitism; IV The Nationalizing of Minorities; V The "Pan" Movements; VI Agitation among Submerged Nationalities.            242

Chapter VIII                THE EUROPEAN STATE SYSTEM IN THE CENTURY'S LAST DECADE

I Dropping the Pilot; II Reformation of Alliances; III Stability and Flux in the State System; IV Impact of Japan and the United States on Europe; V The Apotheosis of the British Empire—and England's Isolation; VI The International Peace Conference of 1899.   286

Chapter IX                  THE CLIMAX OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

I The Cult of Progress; II Great Expectations; III The Lurking Nemesis.            328

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY            341
Revised

INDEX            381

MAPS

EUROPE IN 1871    xiv

EUROPE IN 1900    xvi

SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE IN 1877‑1878            35

THE RAILWAY NETWORK OF EUROPE IN 1880            89

EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN AFRICA IN 1890    235

THE NATIONALITIES OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE            266

IMPERIALISM IN THE FAR EAST IN 1900    307

[vi/vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The illustrations, grouped in a separate section, will be found following page 178.

1. Emperor William I's Triumphal Return to Berlin, 1871

2. Queen Victoria after her Diamond jubilee, 1897

3. Parliament Building, Berlin

4. Making Steel by the Bessemer Process, 1875

5. Making Machine Tools in the 1870's

6. Supplying Power for First Electric Street Railway

7. Tramcars on First Electric Street Railway

8. H. L. F. von Helmholtz

9. Werner von Siemens

10. Sir Charles Parsons

11. Wilhelm von Röntgen

12. Prophecy of Mechanized War, 1882

13. Building the Trans‑Siberian Railway, 1893

14. Pasteur in his Laboratory

15. Administering Anaesthesia in a Paris Hospital

16. Popular Scientific Lecturing in the 1870's

17. Thomas Henry Huxley

18. Ernst Haeckel

19. August Weismann

20. Wilhelm Wundt

21. "Pithecanthropus Erectus"

22. Rodin's The Thinker

23. Herbert Spencer

24. Missionary "White Fathers" of Cardinal Lavigerie in North Africa

25. Friedrich Nietzsche

26. Richard Strauss

27. Giacomo Puccini

28. Peter Tschaikovsky

29. Claude Debussy

30. Émile Zola

31. Leo Tolstoy

[vii/viii]

32. Anatole France

33. Henrik Ibsen

34. Meunier's The Miners

35. Self‑Portrait by Manet in Impressionist Style

36. Self‑Portrait by Cezanne in Post‑Impressionist Style

37. Van Gogh's Night Cafe in Arles

38. Gauguin's Three Tahitians

39. Seurat's Side Show

40. Toulouse‑Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge

41. London Society in the '90's

42. Preparations for a Strike

43. August Bebel

44. Jules Guesde

45. Prince Peter Kropotkin

46. The Socialist Bogey

47. Suffrage Demonstration at Brussels, May Day, 1886

48. Departure of Peasant Emigrants from a German Village

49. Women Clerks in the Paris Telegraph Office

50. Cecil Rhodes

51. Carl Peters

52. Kitchener

53. Leopold II

54. Kipling and the "Lesser Breeds"

55. A German View of British Imperialism

56. Pope Leo XIII

57. Emperor Francis Joseph

58. Tsar Alexander III

59. Joseph Chamberlain

60. An English View of William II

61. Europe Confronting the "Yellow Peril"

62. Bismarck in Retirement

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
(Revised as of January, 1963)
[fragment]

[Chapter III]

[M. E. M. Walker, Pioneers of] Public Health (London, 1930). In addition, there are several noteworthy biographies of leading contributors to medical science: R. J. Dubos, Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science (London, 1951; W. W. Cheyne, Lister and His Achievement (London, 1925); C. Posner, Rudolf Virchow, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1921); Karl Wezel, Robert Koch (Leipzig, 1912).

The chief manual for the general history of physical and biological science is W. T. Sedgwick and H. W. Tyler, A Short History of Science, rev. ed. (New York, 1939), and the most illuminating account is Sir William C. Dampier, A History of Science in its Relations with Philosophy and Religion, 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1948). Specifically on physical science, the standard text is F. Cajori, History of Physics, rev. ed. (New York, 1929), and on chemistry, Eduard Farber, The Evolution of Chemistry (New York, 1955) and F. S. Taylor, A History of Industrial Chemistry (London, 1957).

On biology and Darwinian evolution: Charles J. Singer, A History of Biology, rev. ed. (New York, 1950); G. G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, 1949); Geoffrey West, Charles Darwin, a Portrait (New Haven, 1938), one of the best of innumerable lives of the evolutionist; Sir P. C. Mitchell, Thomas Henry Huxley (New York, 1900); W. B61sche, Ernst Haeckel, Eng. trans. (London, 1906); August Weismann, The Evolution Theory, Eng. trans. (London, 1904); Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science (London, 1901), which means, in this case, from the standpoint of racial and social Darwinism; Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel (New York, 1932).

On physiological psychology: E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York, 1950); H. G. Kurella, Cesare Lombroso, a Modern Man of Science, Eng. trans. (London, 1911).

The materialism and mechanism of the era are explicit or implicit, in a rather eulogistic manner, in the well‑written classic, J. T. Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1912‑1928). More questioning works on the subject are F. A. Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance, Eng. Trans., 3rd ed. (New York, 1950); Karl Löwith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche (Zurich, 1941); Ernst Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung historisch‑kritisch dargestellt, 9th ed. (Leipzig, 1933), with abridged Eng. trans. as The Science of Mechanics by T. J. McCormack, 5th ed. (La Salle, 1942); and with particular brilliance, Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, the Fatal Legacy of "Progress," 2nd ed. (New York, 1954).

[362/363]

Strangely enough, little specific study has been devoted to the history of positivism and its manifold influence in our era. There is a monograph on English positivism as a religion: J. E. McGee, A Crusade for Humanity, the History of Organized Positivism in England (London, 1931); and there is a bibliography in Italian by F. Valsecchi (Milan, 1957). Positivist influence on the social sciences can be gathered from such notable works as Charles Gide and Charles Rist, History of Economic Doctrines, Eng. trans., 2nd ed. (Boston, 1948); G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, new ed. (New York, 1952); Pieter Geyl, From Ranke to Toynbee (Northampton, Mass., 1952); Antoine Guilland, Modern Germany and Her Historians, Eng. trans. (London, 1915); Rudolph Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, Eng. trans. (Cambridge, 1938); Crane Brinton, Ideas and Men: the Story of Western Thought (New York, 1950).

Chapter IV

The principal reference books on religion are The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. by C. G. Herbermann and others, 15 vols. (New York, 1907‑1912), now being drastically revised and supplemented; Realencyklopädie für protestanische Theologie und Kirche, ed. by J. K. Herzog and Albert Hauck, 3rd ed., 24 vols. (Leipzig, 1896‑1913); Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. by James Hastings and others, 13 vols. (Edinburgh, 1908‑1927); V. T. A. Ferm, A Protestant Dictionary (New York, 1951); Encyclopedia Judaica, 10 vols. through letter L (Berlin, 1928‑1934); H. A. R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers, Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam (Ithaca, 1957); Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. by H. Gunkel and L. Zscharnack, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1927‑1932); Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (London, 1947).

K. S. Latourette, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, a History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, of which three vols. of the total five are here pertinent, The 19th Century in Europe: Background and the Roman Catholic Phase (New York, 1958), The Protestant and Eastern Churches (1959), The 19th Century outside Europe, 1815‑1914 (1961), a notably comprehensive work by a distinguished Protestant scholar; Fernand Mourret, History of the Catholic Church, Eng. trans. by Newton Thompson, vol. V (St. Louis, 1955), a standard Catholic work; J. H. Nichols, History of Christianity, 1650‑1950: Secularization of the West (New York, 1956), part III, 1870‑1914, a brief Protestant survey; Philip Hughes, A Popular History of the Catholic Church, 3rd rev. ed. (London, 1947), a brief Catholic survey.

SOURCE: Hayes, Carlton J. H. A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900. New York: Harper & Row, 1963, orig.1941. xii, 390 pp., [32] pp. of leaves: ill., maps, ports. (Series: Rise of Modern Europe; Harper torchbooks; TB 3039)

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

CONTACT Ralph Dumain