F

ISKE, JOHN, an American philosopher and historian; born at Hartford, Conn., March 30, 1842; died at East Gloucester, Mass. July 4, 1901. His name was originally Edmund Fiske Greene, but he assumed that of his maternal great grandfather. As a boy he resided at Middletown, Conn., where he studied philosophy and languages, and was well advanced in learning when he entered college. His education was completed at Harvard University, and at the Dane Law School, from which he graduated in 1865. In 1869 he was appointed Lecturer on Philosophy at Harvard, in 1870 Tutor in History, and in 1872 Assistant Librarian, which office he held until 1879. He early determined to devote his life to the study of the origin and progress of the human race, especially along the lines of Christianity, evolution, and general history. His lectures on American History, delivered in Boston in 1879, were repeated by invitation before university audiences in London and Edinburgh. He published Myths and Myth-makers (1872); Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874); The Unseen World (1876); Darwinism and Other Essays (1879); Excursions of an Evolutionist (1883); The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin (1884); The

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Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge; American Political Ideas (1885); The Doctrine of Evolution (1892); History of the United States (1894); The War of Independence (1894); Old Virginia and Her Neighbors (1897); The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America (1899); Through Nature to God (1899); New France and New England (1901); and Essays (1901).

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THE SCIENTIFIC MEANING OF THE WORD FORCE."

In illustration of the mischief that has been wrought by the Augustinian conception of Deity, we may cite the theological objections urged against the Newtonian theory of gravitation and the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Leibnitz, who, as a mathematician but little inferior to Newton himself, might have been expected to be easily convinced of the truth of the theory of gravitation, was nevertheless deterred by theological scruples from accepting it. It appeared to him that it substituted the action of physical forces for the direct action of the Deity. Now the fallacy of this argument of Leibnitz is easy to detect. It lies in a metaphysical misconception. of the meaning of the word "force." "Force " is implicitly regarded as a sort of entity or dæmon which has a mode of action distinguishable from that of Deity; otherwise it is meaningless to speak of substituting one for the other. But such a personification of "force" is a remnant of barbaric thought, in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting each other with a force" which varies directly as their masses and inversely as the square of their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase as a convenient metaphor by which to describe the manner in which the observed movements of the two bodies occur. It explains that in presence of each other the two bodies are observed to change their positions in a certain specified way, and this is all that it means. This is all that a strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, and this is all that observation can possibly prove,