Thus the American national ideal of the Middle Period was essentially geographical.  The popular thinkers of that day were hypnotized by the reiterated suggestion of a new American world.  Their fellow-countrymen had obtained and were apparently making good use of a wholly unprecedented amount of political and economic freedom; and they jumped to the conclusion that the different disciplinary methods which limited both individual and social action in Europe were unnecessary.  Just as the Jacksonian Democracy had finally vindicated American political independence by doing away with the remnants of our earlier political colonialism, so American moral and intellectual independence demanded a similar vindication.  This geographical protestantism was in a measure provoked, if not justified, by the habit of colonial dependence upon Europe in matters of opinion, which so many well-educated Americans of that period continued to cherish.  But it was based upon the illusion that the economic and social conditions of the Middle Period, which favored temporarily a mixture of faith and irresponsibility, freedom and formlessness, would persist and could be translated into terms of individual intellectual and moral discipline.  In truth, it was, of course, a great mistake to conceive Americanism as intellectually and morally a species of Newer-Worldliness.  A national intellectual ideal did not divide us from Europe any more than did a national political ideal.  In both cases national independence had no meaning except in a system of international, intellectual, moral, and political relations.  American national independence was to be won, not by means of a perverse opposition to European intellectual and moral influence, but by a positive and a thorough-going devotion to our own national democratic ideal.

The national intellectual ideal could afford to be as indifferent to the sources of American intellectual life as the American political ideal was to the sources of American citizenship.  The important thing was and is, not where our citizens or our special disciplinary ideals come from, but what use we make of them.  Just as economic and political Americanism has been broad enough and vital enough to make a place in the American social economy for the hordes of European immigrants with their many diverse national characteristics, so the intellectual basis of Americanism must be broad enough to include and vigorous enough to assimilate the special ideals and means of discipline necessary to every kind of intellectual or moral excellence.  The technical ideals and standards which the typical American of the Middle Period instinctively under-valued are neither American nor European.  They are merely the special forms whereby the several kinds of intellectual eminence are to be obtained.  They belong to the nature of the craft.  Those forms and standards were never sufficiently naturalized in America during the Colonial Period, because the economic and social conditions of the time did not justify such naturalization.  The appropriate occasion for the transfer was postponed until after American political independence had been secured; and when occasion did not arise, the naturalness of the transfer was perverted and obscured by political preconceptions.