Spencer’s American followers embraced the “metaphysic creed” that James attacked. John Fiske was an historian and philosopher who celebrated the ascendancy of an English “race.” His 1879 lecture “The Manifest Destiny of the English Race” was, in the words of an admirer, a “logical application of the doctrine of Evolution to the developing interest of humanity” and a comprehensive view of “America’s place in universal history.” Andrew Carnegie, something of an outlier among the acolytes, was approaching fifty in 1882, and he had latched onto Spencer to justify his own amazing fortune—which owed
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