inctive."
There is nothing profound in this view, but it expresses well the
average thought of the period,--that Americanism in literature must be
the very gradual growth of new circumstances, experience, and
associations, which may superficially modify the unbroken mass of
thought which has been transplanted from Europe, just as vines and
flowers take on their modifications in a new soil and climate.
Far different from this is the view that anthropology gives us. The
foreign plant, it is true, will gradually change, but a native plant
will ultimately take its place by the law of the "survival of the
fittest." The exotic must die out, for it was but a hothouse plant,
reared in universities and cathedrals.
The thought, the science, the philosophy, and even the forms of
literary expression, for this continent, will be those which spring
from the bosom of nature, fresh and strong, imbued with the spiritual
element of immortality, the element of luminous originality.
How and whence is this to come? It will come by the complete
emancipation of the American mind from the thraldom of the false
philosophies, the false theologies, and the debasingly narrow
conceptions of science which have been transplanted into American
colleges. When the strong American intellect shall realize that in the
science of man and in the cultivation of psychometry there is more of
enlightenment, of wisdom, and of actual knowledge than in all that
colleges cherish to-day, we shall have such a flood of original
thought and immensely valuable knowledge as would seem impossible to
the literati who now have the public ear.
Even the narrowest dogmatists of science are beginning to have a
glimpse of the nobler knowledge of the future. Prof. Huxley, the most
dogmatic of British sceptics, has recently said:
"The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all
science, means the demonstration of order and natural causation among
phenomena which had not previously been brought under those
conceptions. Nobody who is acquainted with the progress of scientific
thinking in every department of human knowledge, in the course of the
last two centuries, will be disposed to deny that immense provinces
have been added to the realm of science, or to doubt that the next two
centuries will be witnesses of a vastly greater annexation. More
particularly in the region of the physiology of the nervous system is
it justifiable to conclude from the prog
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