The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

One fundamental note sounded through the whole. Life was not to be lived for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of duty. Existence got its sense and value only in ethical endeavour; self-perfection was the great duty which took precedence over all others. Among the particularly dogmatic tenets of the Calvinistic theology this self-searching became, in the last resort, perhaps a somewhat dispiriting searching after inner signs by which God was expected to show somewhat arbitrarily his favour. More broadly taken, however, it signified rather a continual searching of the conscience—a conscious suppression of impure, of worldly, and of selfish impulses; and so in effect it was an untiring moral purification. And if in this theological atmosphere it appeared as if God had led a singularly large number of predestined spirits together into the New England colonies, the reason was obviously this—that in such a community of earnest, self-searching characters a moral purity developed such as was to be found nowhere in the wild turmoil of the Old World. When the entire life is so permeated by ethical ideals, there indeed the nobler part of man’s nature cannot be conquered by lower instincts or by the sordid demands of every-day life.

Such a place could not fail to be a favourable environment for any intellectual undertakings. There serious books were more welcome than the merely amusing ones which flourished in the rest of the colonies. In New England more was done for education, the development of law and the service of God, than for any outward show or material prosperity. In short, the life of the intellect throve there from the very outset. And yet of course this spirit of culture necessarily took a turn very different from what it had been in the mother land, different from what it was on the Continent, and different from what it would have been if the Southern colonies had been intellectually dominant.

For the Puritan, absolutely the whole of culture was viewed from the moral point of view. But the moral judgment leads always to the individual; neither in the physical nor in the psychical world can anything be found which has an ethical value except the good will of the individual. No work of culture has any value in itself; it becomes ethically significant only in its relation to the individual will, and all intellectual life has ethically a single aim—to serve the highest development of the individual. From this point of view, therefore, science, poetry, and art have no objective value: for the Puritan, they are nothing to accept and to make himself subordinate to; but they are themselves subordinate means merely toward that one end—the perfection of the man. Life was a moral problem, for which art and science became important only in so far as they nourished the inner growth of every aspirant. In the language of the newer time we might say that a community developed under Puritan influences cared considerably more for the culture of its individual members than for the creation of things intellectual, that the intellectual worker did not set out to perfect art and science, but aimed by means of art and science to perfect himself.

Of course there must be some reciprocal working between the general body of culture and the separate personalities, but the great tendency had to be very different from that which it would have been had the chief emphasis been laid on æsthetic or intellectual productions as such. In Europe during the decisive periods the starting-point has been and to-day is, the objective; and this has only secondarily come to be significant for the subjective individual life. But in Puritan America the soul’s welfare stood in the foreground, and only secondarily was the striving for self-perfection, self-searching, and self-culture made to contribute to the advance of objective culture. As a consequence individual characters have had to be markedly fine even at a time in which all creative achievements of enduring significance were very few. Just in the opposite way the history of the culture of non-puritanical Europe has shown the greatest creative achievements at the very times when personal morals were at their lowest ebb.

But the spirit of self-perfection can have still an entirely different source. In ethical idealism the perfection of personality is its own end; but this perfection of the individual may also be a means to an end, an instrument for bringing about the highest possible capacity for achievement in practical life. This is the logic of utilitarianism. For utilitarianism as well as for Puritan idealism the growth of science and art, and the development of moral institutions, are nothing in themselves, but are significant only as they work backward on the minds of the individuals. Idealism demands the intellectual life for the sake of the individual soul’s welfare, utilitarianism for the sake of the individual’s outward success. A greater antithesis could hardly be thought of; and nevertheless the desire for self-perfection is common to both, and for both the increase of the national products of culture are at the outset indifferent. It is clear that both of these tendencies in their sociological results will always reach out far beyond their initial aims. Puritanism and utilitarianism, although they begin with the individual, nevertheless must bear their fruits in the whole intellectual status of the nation. Ethical idealism aims not only to receive, but also to give. To be sure, it gives especially in order to inspire in others its own spirit of self-perfection, but in order so to inspire and so to work it must give expression to its inner ideals by the creation of objects of art and science. Utilitarianism, on the contrary, must early set such a premium on all achievements which make for prosperity that in the same way again the individual, from purely utilitarian motives, is incited to bring his thought to a creative issue. The intellectual life of the nation which is informed with Puritan and utilitarian impulses, will therefore, after a certain period, advance to a new and national stage of culture; but the highest achievements will be made partly in the service of moral ideals, partly in the service of technical culture. As the result of the first tendency, history, law, literature, philosophy, and religion will come to their flowering; in consequence of the second tendency, science and technique.

In modern Continental Europe, both these tendencies have been rather weakly developed. From the outset idealism has had an intellectual and æsthetic bias. Any great moral earnestness has been merely an episode in the thought of those nations; and in the same way, too, utilitarianism has played really a subordinate rôle in their intellectual life, because the desire for free initiative has never been a striking feature in the intellectual physiognomy. The love of truth, the enjoyment of beauty, and the social premiums for all who minister to this love and pleasure have been in Continental Europe more potent factors in the national intellectual life than either ethical idealism or practical utilitarianism. And it is only because of its steady assimilation of all European immigrants that the Puritan spirit of the New England colonies has become the fundamental trait of the country, and that moral earnestness has not been a mere episode also in the life of America.

There is no further proof necessary that, along with idealism, utilitarianism has in fact been an efficient factor in all intellectual activities of America. Indeed, we have very closely traced out how deeply the desire for self-initiative has worked on the population and been the actual spring of the economic life of all classes. But for the American it has been also a matter of course that the successful results of initiative presuppose, in addition to energy of character, technical training and the best possible liberal education. Here and there, to be sure, there appears a successful self-made man—a man who for his lack of making has only himself to thank—and he comes forward to warn young people to be wary of the higher culture, and to preach to them that the school of practical life is the sole high-road to success. But the exemplary organization of the great commercial corporations is itself a demonstration against any such fallacious paradoxes. Precisely there the person with the best training is always placed at the head, and the actual results of American technique would be still undreamt of if the American had preferred, before the solid intellectual mastery of his problems, really nothing but energy or “dash” or, say, mere audacity. The issues which really seriously interest the American are not between the adherents of culture and the adherents of mere push, undeterred by any culture; the material value of the highest possible intellectual culture has come to be a dogma. The real issues are mainly even to-day those between the Puritanical and utilitarian ideals of self-perfection. Of course those most in the heat of battle are not aware of this; and yet when in the thousandfold discussions the question comes up whether the higher schools and colleges should have fixed courses of instruction for the sake of imparting a uniform and general culture, or whether on the other hand specialization should be allowed to step in and so to advance the time for the technical training, then the Puritans of New England and the utilitarians of the Middle States are ranged against each other.

In fact, it is the Middle, and a little later on the Western, States, where along with the tremendous development of the instinct of individual initiative the pressure for the utilitarian exploitation of the higher intellectual powers has been most lively. Also this side of the American spirit has not sprung up to-day nor yesterday; and its influence is neither an immoral nor a morally indifferent force. Utilitarianism has decidedly its own ethics. It is the robust ethics of the Philistine, with its rather trivial references to the greatest good of the greatest number and citations of the general welfare. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, preached no mean morality, along with his labours for politics and science; but his words, “Honesty is the best policy,” put morality on a level with the lightning-rod which he invented. Both are means toward human prosperity. Although born and bred in Boston, Franklin did not feel himself at home there, where for the best people life was thought to be “a trembling walk with God.” For him Philadelphia was a more congenial field of activity. To-day there is no single place which is specially noted for its utilitarian turn of mind. It is rather a matter of general dissemination, for the influence of the entire Western population goes in this direction. But no one should for a moment imagine that this utilitarian movement has overcome or destroyed the Puritan spirit. The actual state of the national culture can be understood only as a working together of these two types of the spirit of self-perfection; and even to-day, the Puritan spirit is the stronger—the spirit of New England is in the lead.

All that we have so far spoken of relates to that which is distinctly of national origin; over and above this there is much which the American has adopted from other nations. The most diverse factors work to make this importation from foreign thought more easy. The wealth and the fondness for travel of the American, his craze for collections, and his desire to have in everything the best—this in addition to the uninterrupted stream of immigration and much else—have all brought it about that anything which is foreign is only too quickly adopted in the national culture. Not until very lately has a more or less conscious reaction against this sort of thing stepped in, partly through the increased strengthening of the national consciousness, but more specially through the surprisingly quick rise of native achievement. The time for imitation in architecture has gone by and the prestige of the English romance is at an end. And yet to-day English literature, French art, and German music still exercise here their due and potent influence.

Now, in addition to these influences which spring from the culture of foreign nations, come finally those impulses which are not peculiar to any one nation, but spring up in every country out of the lower instincts and pleasures. Everywhere in the world mere love of diversion tries to step in and to usurp the place of æsthetic pleasure. Everywhere curiosity and sensational abandon are apt to undermine purely logical interests, and everywhere a mere excitability tries to assume the rôle of moral ardour. Everywhere the weak and trivial moral, æsthetic, and intellectual appeals of the variety stage may come to be preferred over the serious appeals of the drama. It is said that this tendency, which was always deeply rooted in man’s nature, is felt more noticeably in our nervous and excitable times than it was in the old days. In a similar way one may say that it shows out still stronger in America than it does in other countries. The reason for this is clear. Political democracy is responsible for part of it; for in the name of that equality which it postulates, it instinctively lends more countenance to the æsthetic tastes, the judgment, and the moral inspiration of the butcher, the baker and candlestick-maker than is really desirable if one has at heart the development of absolute culture. Perhaps an even more important factor is the purely economic circumstance that in America the masses possess a greater purchasing power than in any other country, and for this reason are able to exert a more immediate influence on the intellectual life of the land. The great public is not more trivial in the United States than elsewhere; it is rather, as in every democracy, more mature and self-contained; but in America this great public is more than elsewhere in the material position to buy great newspapers, and to support theatres; and is thus able to exert a degrading influence on the intellectual level of both newspaper and theatre.