[289] Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.” I cannot—as I have indicated elsewhere in regard to Mr. Russell—see for one moment how there is any justification for looking upon this “ordered cosmos” of mathematical physics as anything other than an abstraction from the real world with which we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit of man, without an examination of the mind of the mathematician and of the nature of the concepts and symbols that he uses in his researches? There is a whole world of dispute and discussion about all these things.
[290] I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American characteristics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer intellectual and social atmosphere of the present time, the atmosphere that impresses the visitor and the resident from the old world, the atmosphere to the creation of which he himself and his fellow-immigrants have contributed, as well as the native-born American of two generations ago—to go no further back. I mean that anything like a far-reaching analysis or consideration of the great qualities that go to make up the “soul” of the United States is, of course, altogether beyond the sphere of my attention for the present. I fully subscribe, in short, to the truth of the following words of Professor Santayana, one of the most scholarly and competent American students (both of philosophy and of life) of the passing generation: “America is not simply a young country with an old mentality; it is a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation. In all the higher things of the mind—in religion, literature, in the moral emotions, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times.”—“The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in Winds of Doctrine (p. 187).
[291] A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in his book upon The American Mind naturally singles out radicalism as one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the other characteristics of which he speaks are those of the “love of exaggeration,” “idealism,” “optimism,” “individualism,” “public spirit.” I refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages, although of course I had not the benefit of Professor Perry’s book in writing the present chapter.
[292] I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of America as (despite some appearances to the contrary—appearances to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally a religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious ideas that were a highly important counterpart to some of the eighteenth-century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised their influence upon the fathers of the republic.
[293] He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.
[295] The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 1912 clearly showed this.
[296] We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.
[297] It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which it rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to think and speak of the apparently purely “economic” or “business-like” character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote Professor Bliss Perry here ... “the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated business-man face [italics mine], the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd” (p. 158). “There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the ‘transcendental’ movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised, unvitalised American manhood and womanhood” (p. 160).
[298] And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of “personality” and of the “self.”