With this I have finished such a sketch as I am here able to offer you of the genteel tradition in American philosophy.  The subject is complex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote; yet I think the main outlines are clear enough.  The chief fountains of this tradition were Calvinism and transcendentalism.  Both were living fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.  When these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared—­and the American atmosphere is not favourable to either of them—­the two systems ceased to be inwardly understood; they subsisted as sacred mysteries only; and the combination of the two in some transcendental system of the universe (a contradiction in principle) was doubly artificial.  Besides, it could hardly be held with a single mind.  Natural science, history, the beliefs implied in labour and invention, could not be disregarded altogether; so that the transcendental philosopher was condemned to a double allegiance, and to not letting his left hand know the bluff that his right hand was making.  Nevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate convictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has subsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic to take its place.

The academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned.  On the one side came the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism, welcoming popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science to an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to be wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.

This revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you, who live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and prodigious world.  When you transform nature to your uses, when you experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you cannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these adjustments would have been pre-established.  Much less can you feel it when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm.  You must feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little force among her immense forces.  When you escape, as you love to do, to your forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel you made them, or that they were made for you.  They have grown, as you have grown, only more massively and more slowly.  In their non-human beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman possibilities of your own spirit.  It is no transcendental logic that they teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in the world.  It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic, the needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength of time, the fertility of matter, the