To the needs of “the heart” minister the innumerable sects (and here again, the American religious history repeats, in magnified proportions, the characteristics of English religious life). But because of the gradual impoverishment of the central religious tradition of the country, because of the scanty cultural background of both apostles and neophytes, it is hard to recognize in the whole movement an intimate spiritual dialectic which might lend strength and significance to the individual sects. A vague mysticism appropriates to itself, in a haphazard and capricious fashion, shadows and ghosts of religious experiences and opinions, whose germs of truth lie in other ages and other climates. The only common feature seems to be a distrust of intellect, derived from the original divorce of the intellectual from the spiritual in the Puritan, a distrust which at times becomes active in the denunciation of the supposed crimes of science. It is this fundamental common feature which will for ever prevent any of them from becoming what all sects fail to be, a religion.
The two states of mind which are nearer to-day to being true religions are, on one side, Americanism (a religion as a common bond), and on the other, Radicalism (a religion as a personal experience). Americanism is the more or less perfect expression of the common belief that American ideals realize themselves in American society. Radicalism is the more or less spasmodic protest against such a belief, sometimes coupled with an individual attempt at realizing those ideals in one’s life and actions. The sharpest contrast between the two attitudes is to be found in their ideas of political and spiritual freedom; which to one is a condition actually existing by the mere fact of the existence of American society such as it is, and to the other a dynamic principle which can never be permanently associated with any particular set of institutions.
The original spirit of Puritanism can hardly be said to be alive to-day in America. In a few intellectuals, it confuses itself with other high forms of moral discipline in the past, and reappears with a strange fidelity to form rather than substance, as Platonism, Classicism, Mediævalism, Catholicism, or any other set of fixed standards that can be accepted as a whole, and can give the soul that sense of security which is inherent in the illusion of possessing the final truth. The consequence of such a deviation is that these truly religious souls, after having satisfied themselves with a sufficiently vast and beautiful interpretation of their creed, resent any cruder and more dangerous form of intellectual experience much more keenly than they resent crudities and dangers actually present in the nature of things. They are intellectuals, but again, with no faith in intellect; they are truly isolated among their fellow-countrymen, and yet they believe in conformity, and assume the conformity of American society to be the conformity of their dreams.
Such a static apprehension of truth, such an identification of universal spiritual values with one or another particular tradition, is in fact as much an obstacle to the new life of the human spirit as the external conformity enforced by social optimism. But the polemic against the older intellectuals is carried on by younger men, many of them of recent immigrant blood, but all of them reared in the atmosphere of American culture, and who differ from them more in the objects of their preference than in the vastness or depth of their outlook. There is a way of clinging to the latest fashion in philosophy or in art which is not a progress in any sense in relation to older faiths; of combating a manifest logical fallacy by the use of the same sophism; of embracing sin with the same moral enthusiasm that in less enlightened times was kept in reserve for the highest virtues only.
More important, for their influence on certain phases of American life, than these intellectual echoes, are the moralistic remnants of Puritanism. It is always possible, for small groups of people, strongly endowed with the sense of other people’s duties, to intimidate large sections of public opinion into accepting the logical consequences of certain undisputed moral assumptions, however widely they may differ from the realities of American life. It is under such circumstances that the kind-hearted, easy-going American pays the penalty for his identification of realities with ideals, by being deprived of some very dear reality in the name of an ideal which had long since ceased to have any meaning for him.
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From whatever side we look at American culture, we are constantly brought face to face with a disregard or distrust, or a narrow conception, of purely intellectual values, which seems to be the common characteristic of widely divergent spiritual attitudes. The American does not, as the Englishman, glory in his capacity for muddling through: he is proud of certain logical achievements, and has a fondness for abstract schemes, an earnest belief in their validity and efficiency; but no more than the English does he believe that intellect is an integral part of the human personality. He recognizes the identity of goodness and truth, provided that truth can be found out by other means than purely intellectual: by common sense, by revelation, by instinct, by imagination, but not by intellect. It is here that even the defenders, among Americans, of the classical tradition miss the true meaning of the message of Socrates and Plato, the foundation of humanism.
What is peculiarly American in the opinions of American philosophers is a clear and distinct expression of the common attitude. The official philosophy of America has repeated for a century the views of English empiricists and of German idealists, sometimes with very interesting and illuminating personal variations. It has even, and it is an original achievement, brought them to lose their peculiar accents and to coincide in new theories of knowledge. But the heart of American philosophy is not there: it is in pragmatism, in instrumentalism, in whatever other theory clearly establishes the purely functional character of truth, the mechanical aspect of intellect. Having put the criterion of truth outside the intellect, and considered intellect as the mere mechanism of belief, these doctrines try to re-establish the dignity of intellect by making of it a machine for the reproduction of morally or socially useful beliefs. The operation is similar to that of an anatomist who, having extracted the heart from a living body, would presume to reconstruct the body by artificially promoting the movements of the heart. The doctrine of the purely pragmatic or instrumental nature of intellect, which is the logical clarification of the popular conception, is a doctrine of radical scepticism, whatever the particular declarations of faith of the philosophers themselves might say to the contrary: it destroys not the objects of knowledge only, but the instrument itself.
American philosophers came to this doctrine through the psychological and sociological approach to the problems of the mind. Such an approach is in keeping with the general tendency towards assuming the form of natural and mathematical sciences, which moral sciences in American universities have been obeying during the last thirty or forty years, partly under the influence of a certain kind of European positivism, and partly because of the prestige that natural and mathematical sciences gained from their practical applications. Even now it is easier to find a truly humanistic mind, a sound conception of intellectual values, among the great American scientists than among the philosophers and philologists: but pure science has become the most solitary of occupations, and the scientist the most remote of men, since his place in society has been taken by the inventor and by the popularizer. Psychology and sociology, those half-literary, half-scientific disciplines, gave as a basis to philosophy not the individual effort to understand and to think, but the positive observation of the more or less involuntary processes of thought in the multitude. Intellect was sacrificed to a democratic idea of the equality of minds: how could the philosopher presume to think, I do not say better or more efficiently than, but differently from the multitude? To European philosophy the reproach has been made again and again, and with some justice, of imposing laws upon reality which are only the laws of individual philosophic thought; and yet what else does the scientist ultimately do? But both scientist and philosopher find their justification in their faith in the validity of their instruments: in a spirit of devotion and humility, not in a gratuitous presumption. The typical American philosopher has sold his birthright, not for a pottage of lentils, but for mere love.
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