"to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world's flowing fates in his own mould recast."
According to this definition Abraham Lincoln, with his slight knowledge of the best things of the past, but with the power to fuse such knowledge as he had and to recast it in his own mould, was a man of culture. And all true Americans would agree with him.
Emerson, like the "sociable, accessible, republican sort of man" that he was, was the foe of special privilege. The best things were, in his judgment, the property of all. He would take religion from the custody of the priests, and culture from the hands of schoolmasters, and restore them to their proper place, among the inalienable rights of man. They were simply forms of the pursuit of happiness of which the Declaration of Independence speaks. It is a right of which no potentates can justly deprive the citizen.
Above all, he would protest against everything which tends to deprive anyone of the happiness of the forward look. There was a cheerful confidence that the great forces are on our side. Now and then the clouds gather and obscure the vision, but:
"There are open hours
When God's will sallies free
And the dull idiot may see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years."
This is the American doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" spiritually discerned.
V
But one need not go so far back as Emerson to see the higher reaches of the American temperament. Perhaps in no one have they been revealed with more distinctness than in William James. There are those who consider it dispraise of a philosopher to suggest that his work has local color. However that may be, William James thought as an American as certainly as Plato thought as a Greek. His way of philosophizing was one that belonged to the land of his birth.