Now this situation is a singular and remarkable one, and has many consequences, not all of which are equally fortunate.  America is a young country with an old mentality:  it has enjoyed the advantages of a child carefully brought up and thoroughly indoctrinated; it has been a wise child.  But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always has a comic and an unpromising side.  The wisdom is a little thin and verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and emotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged.  Or when the child is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of his own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh mentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly despised.  A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it.  I do not think the hereditary philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed has caught the stale odour from it.  America is not simply, as I said a moment ago, 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 generations.  In all the higher things of the mind—­in religion, in 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 truth is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids.  This division may be found symbolised in American architecture:  a neat reproduction of the colonial mansion—­with some modern comforts introduced surreptitiously—­stands beside the sky-scraper.  The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion.  The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman.  The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.

Now, with your permission, I should like to analyse more fully how this interesting situation has arisen, how it is qualified, and whither it tends.  And in the first place we should remember what, precisely, that philosophy was which the first settlers brought with them into the country.  In strictness there was more than one; but we may confine our attention to what I will call Calvinism, since it is on this