Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

III. On Certain Limitations of the Thoughtful Public in America

III on certain limitations of the thoughtful public in america No one who is engaged in any part of the work of the higher education in this country can doubt that, at the present time, our thoughtful public,—the great company of those who read, reflect, and aspire,—is a larger factor in our national life than ever before. When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materialism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists . Yet that we are such a nation is something constantly brought to the attention of those whose calling requires them to observe any of the tendencies prevalent in our recent intellectual life in America. I When I speak, in this way, of contemporary American idealists, I do not now specially refer to the holders of any philosophical opinions, or even to the representatives of any one type of religious faith. I here An address first delivered at Vassar College [Royce’s note]. {  }  on certain limitations use the term in no technical sense. In this discussion, I mean by the word ‘‘idealist,’’ a man or woman who is consciously and predominantly guided, in the purposes and in the great choices of life, by large ideals, such as admit of no merely material embodiment, and such as contemplate no merely private and personal satisfaction as their goal. In this untechnical sense the Puritans were idealists. The signers of our Declaration of Independence were idealists. Idealism inspired us during our Civil War. Idealism has expressed itself in the rich differentiation of our national religious life. Idealism has founded our colleges and universities. Well, using the term ‘‘idealism’’ in this confessedly untechnical sense, I say that many of our foreign judges have failed to see how largely we Americans are to-day a nation of idealists. To be sure, we are by no means alone amongst modern men in our idealism. But elsewhere sometimes the consequences of long-continued and oppressive militarism, sometimes the stress of certain social problems, and sometimes the burdens of ancient imperial responsibility, have tended more to discourage, or even quite to subdue, many forms of that fidelity to ideals upon which surely all higher civilization in any country depends. But, with us, ever since the close of the Civil War, numerous forces have been at work to render us as a nation more thoughtful, more aspiring, and more in love with the immaterial things of the spirit, and that too even at the very moment when our material prosperity, with all of its well-known corrupting temptations , has given us much opportunity, had we chosen to take it, to be what the mistaken foreign critics often suppose us to be,—a people really sunk in practical materialism. Moreover, in saying all this, as to our general growth in spiritual interests, I am not at all unmindful of that other side,—that grosser material side of our national life, upon which our foreign critics so often insist. The growth of unwise luxury, the brute power of ill-used wealth, the unideal aspects of our political life, the evils of our great cities,—what enlightened American is there who does not recognize the magnitude of such ills in our midst? But you cannot prove the absence of light merely by exploring the darker chasms and caverns on certain limitations  of our national existence. Vast as are those recesses of night, the light of large and inspiring ideas shines upon still vaster regions of our American life. Side by side with the excesses of mere luxury you find, amongst our people, a true and increasing, a self-sacrificing and intelligent love of the beautiful for its own sake. Side by side with the misuse of money, you observe the encouraging frequency of the great and humane deeds that wealth can do. Nor is this all. An ardent and often successful struggle for social reform, and a civic pride that aims, sometimes even from the very depths of municipal degradation, at the accomplishment of great and honorable public services,—these are tendencies that are growing amongst us, and that are never wholly or permanently checked even by the closest contact with the very worst of our national defects. Yet, of course, the real proof of the prevalence of what I have called idealism, in the great masses of our people, is above all to be...