seeches Londoners to take heart because the modern city is so Christian, though unconsciously. The Giant with the Wounded Heel is one of the finest and most characteristic of his sermons. He believes the giant, man, is constantly crushing the serpent, and he is content to see a pretty large wound in his heel.

This largeness and poise of view is the most distinctive characteristic of Phillips Brooks. It stamps him with the mark of intellect. Occasionally he seems to value the mind for itself and to ascribe to it standards of its own. "The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs." Once he admits, without catching himself, that the mind is "the noblest part of us." In the sermon where this admission is made, The Mind's Love for God, he declares: "You cannot know that one idea is necessarily true because it seems to help you, nor that another idea is false because it wounds and seems to hinder you. Your mind is your faculty for judging what is true." But these are isolated sayings. Ordinarily he refuses to think of the intellect as a thing apart from the entire man, and he finds truth, as did his Master, inherent in life, a personal quality, discovered, determined, and determinable by personal ends. When he first began to think, Socrates was almost the ideal figure. But later, Socrates seemed thin in comparison with Christ. "Socrates brings an argument to meet an objection. Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nature; a whole being which the truth has filled with strength to meet another whole being, which error has filled with feebleness." In his sermon on the death of Lincoln he discloses his inner thought:

A great many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual man or not, as if intellect were a thing, always of the same sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's nature and weigh by itself.

.. The fact is that in all the simplest characters, the line between the mental and moral nature is always vague and indistinct. They run together, and in their best combination you are unable to discriminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and how much is intellectual.

In his student days he confides to his notebook: "A fresh thought may be spoiled by sheer admiration. It was given us

to work in and to live by. . . . It will give its blessing to us only on its knees. From this point of view, thought is as holy a thing as prayer, for both are worship." The best description, perhaps, of his own mind is to be found in his enumeration of the "intellectual characteristics which Christ's disciples gathered from their Master," namely: "A poetic conception of the world we live in, a willing acceptance of mystery, an expectation of progress by development, an absence of fastidiousness that comes from a sense of the possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into the essential."

These peculiar intellectual characteristics, rooted in their passionate reverence for humanity, for its ideals and its achievements, determine the place of Brooks among the great preachers of the world. He is at his best when he preaches by indirection. Enlargement is his effect. A man sees his own time in relation to all time, discovers his greatness by the greatness of which he is a part. Brooks's mission was not to advance the frontiers of knowledge, not even of spiritual knowledge, but rather to annex the cleared areas to the old domains. His abiding preoccupation-fatal to the scientist, detrimental to the sociologist, fortunate for the fame and immediate influence of the preacher-was to hold the present, changing into the future, loyal to the past. He was not the stuff of which martyrs are made, but his soul was of that vastness which kept the public from making martyrs of the truthful. He seems to watch and bless rather than to urge forward. His great service to his age was that of a mediator. Standing himself as a trinitarian and a supernaturalist, rejoicing in the greenness of the historic pastures, he discovered at the base of his doctrines the same essential spiritual food which others sought on freer uplands and less confined stretches. He ministered to orthodox and unorthodox alike beneath their differences. He did much to keep spiritual evolution free from the bitterness and contempt of revolution.

VOL. III-15

T

CHAPTER XVII

Later Philosophy

HE prevailing other-worldliness of American philosophers seems to be the only explanation for our failure to

develop an original and vigorous political philosophy to meet our unique political experience. On a priori grounds it seems indisputable that philosophy must share the characteristics of the life of which it is a part and on which it is its business to reflect. But we actually do not know with certainty what kind of philosophy any given set of historic conditions will always produce. Thus no one has convincingly pointed out any direct and really significant influence on American philosophy exercised by our colonial organization, by the Revolutionary War, by the slavery struggle, by the Civil War, by our unprecedented immigration, or by the open frontier life which our historians now generally regard as the key to American history. The fact that, excepting some passages in Calhoun,' none of our important philosophic writings mentions the existence of slavery or of the negro race, that liberal democratic philosophers like Jefferson' could continue to own and even sell slaves and still fervently believe that all men are created free and equal, ought to serve as a reminder of the air-tight compartments into which the human mind is frequently divided, and of the extent to which one's professed philosophy can be entirely disconnected from the routine of one's daily occupation. Indeed, it would seem that most of our philosophy is not a reflection on life but, like music or Utopian

I See Book II, Chap. xv. The keen pamphlet on Slavery and Freedom by A. T. Bledsoe, the most versatile of our Southern philosophers, and the references to the ethics of slavery in Wayland's Moral Philosophy, can hardly be considered as derogating from the statement in the text. See Book I, Chap. VIII.

Foreign Influences

227

and romantic literature, an escape from it, a turning one's back upon its prosaic monotony. But though genuine philosophy never restricts itself to purely local and temporal affairs, the history of philosophy, as part of the history of the intellectual life of any country, is largely concerned with the life of various national or local traditions, with their growth and struggles, and the interaction between them and the general currents of life into which they must fit, with the general conditions, that is, under which intellectual life is carried on.

The main traditions of American philosophy have been British, that is, English and Scotch; and the Declaration of Independence has had no more influence in the realm of metaphysical speculation than it has had in the realm of our common law. French and German influences have, indeed, not been absent. The community of Western civilization which found in Latin its common language has never been completely broken up. But French and German influences have not been any greater in the United States than in Great Britain. Up to very recently our philosophers have mostly been theologians, and the latter, like the lawyers, cultivate intense loyalty to ancient traditions. In our early national period French free-thought exercised considerable influence, especially in the South; but the free thought of Voltaire, Condillac, and Volney was, after all, an adaptation of Locke and English deism; and its American apostles like Thomas Paine,' Priestley, and Thomas Cooper were, like Franklin' and Jefferson, characteristically British-as were Hume and Gibbon in their day. This movement of intellectual liberalism was almost completely annihilated in the greater portion of the country by the evangelical or revivalist movement. The triumph of revivalism was rendered easier by the weakly organized intellectual life and the economic bankruptcy of the older Southern aristocracy, as reflected in the financial difficulties which embarrassed Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in their old age. The second French wave, the eclectic philosophy of Cousin and Jouffroy, was at bottom simply the Scotch realism of Reid and Stewart over again, with only slight traces of Schelling.

With the organization of our graduate schools on German models, and with a large number of our teachers taking their 1 See Book I, Chap. VIII. * See Book I, Chap. VI.

2

I

doctors' degrees in Germany, Germanic terms and mannerisms gained an apparent ascendancy in our philosophic teachings and writings; but in its substance, philosophy in America has followed the modes prevailing in Great Britain. The first serious attempt to introduce German philosophy into this country came with Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1829), and the apologetic tone of President Marsh's introductory essay showed how powerfully the philosophy of Locke and Reid had become entrenched as a part of the Christian thought of America. Some acquaintance with German philosophy was shown by New England radicals like Theodore Parker, but in the main their interest in things Germanic was restricted to the realm of belles-lettres, biblical criticism, and philology. Though some stray bits of Schelling's romantic nature-philosophy became merged in American transcendentalism, the latter was really a form of Neoplatonism directly descended from the Cambridge platonism of More and Cudworth. Hickok's Rational Psychology (1848) is our only philosophic work of the first twothirds of the nineteenth century to show any direct and serious assimilation of Kant's thought. Hickok, however, professes to reject the whole transcendental philosophy, and, in the main, the Kantian elements in his system are no larger than in the writings of British thinkers like Hamilton and Whewell. The Hegelian influence, which made itself strongly felt in the work of William T. Harris, was even more potent in Great Britain.

In 1835 De Tocqueville reported that in no part of the civilized world was less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. Whether because of absorption in the material conquest of a vast continent, or because of a narrow orthodoxy which was then hindering free intellectual life in England as well as in the United States, the fact remains that nowhere else were free theoretic inquiries held in such little honour. As our colleges were originally all sectarian or denominational, clergymen occupied all the chairs of philosophy. Despite the multitude of sects, the Scottish common-sense philosophy introduced at the end of the eighteenth century at Princeton by Presi

1 See Book II, Chap. VIII.

'One gets the same impression from Harriet Martineau's Society in America and from the account of Philarète Chasles.