America is still a young country,
and this part of it is especially so; and it would have been nothing
extraordinary if, in this young country, material preoccupations had
altogether absorbed people's minds, and they had been too much
engrossed in living to reflect upon life, or to have any philosophy.
The opposite, however, is the case. Not only have you already found
time to philosophise in California, as your society proves, but the
eastern colonists from the very beginning were a sophisticated race.
As much as in clearing the land and fighting the Indians they were
occupied, as they expressed it, in wrestling with the Lord. The
country was new, but the race was tried, chastened, and full of solemn
memories. It was an old wine in new bottles; and America did not have
to wait for its present universities, with their departments of
academic philosophy, in order to possess a living philosophy--to have
a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human
destiny.

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,