d because some
young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a
dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be
afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The
intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has
not been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent. That
is a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.
Something else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the
imagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic
idealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring
things as they are. The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel
tradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought
to be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family,
by the genius of the race. Henceforth there can hardly be the same
peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. Hegel will
be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.
Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been
abandoned. An honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel
tradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.

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