Therefore I now read it almost as if it were written by
another man, and I find to my relief that, on the whole, I think rather
better of it than I did when I published it. Indeed, as a criticism of
what were then the accepted views of Massachusetts history, as expounded
by her most authoritative historians, I see nothing in it to retract or
even to modify. I do, however, somewhat regret the rather acrimonious tone
which I occasionally adopted when speaking of the more conservative
section of the clergy. Not that I think that the Mathers, for example, and
their like, did not deserve all, or, indeed, more than all I ever said or
thought of them, but because I conceive that equally effective strictures
might have been conveyed in urbaner language; and, as I age, I shrink from
anything akin to invective, even in what amounts to controversy.
Therefore I have now nothing to alter in the _Emancipation of
Massachusetts_, viewed as history, though I might soften its asperities
somewhat, here and there; but when I come to consider it as philosophy, I
am startled to observe the gap which separates the present epoch from my
early middle life.
The last generation was strongly Darwinian in the sense that it accepted,
almost as a tenet of religious faith, the theory that human civilization
is a progressive evolution, moving on the whole steadily toward
perfection, from a lower to a higher intellectual plane, and, as a
necessary part of its progress, developing a higher degree of mental
vigor.
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