The Modern Temper admirably summed up the philosophy of defeatism of the muddled and sadly disillusioned post-war generation. Obviously, the intellectual atmosphere which Mr. Krutch described was the one held in part or as a whole by many of his contemporaries. He gives coherent and reasoned utterance to what many of them felt in a more or less nebulous, uncertain manner. The book, nevertheless, is primarily an effort at self-understanding. It is a personal confession as well as a study of "the modern temper". He can disentangle the nervous complexities and compulsions of modern thought with commendable clarity, but, as he frankly admits, his analysis of the emotional reaction induced by these tendencies, is "of necessity colored by an individual personality". Even though he endeavors to select for analysis only those emotional attitudes which are typical, his choice as well as his treatment was sure to be biased to some degree by his intellectual preconceptions. For he is concerned not with verifiable observations, but with a state of mind, "and in the effort to describe and account for it I am responsible not for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or otherwise, which I and my contemporaries have been led to hold". What Mr. Krutch evidently means to imply is that he does not have to justify the state of mind of any age; it exists; he is merely recording it. But certainly in recording it—just as if he were tracing a nerve impulse in the laboratory—he is responsible for making veracious observations that can be tested. If his observations are in error, then his conclusions must likewise be wrong. No writer can afford to shirk the responsibility of truth.
Mr. Krutch is decidedly unhappy because he has discovered that the world of today is not the same world that has been pictured by thinkers in the past. Evil and good are not cleancut and diametrically opposed; Nature is supremely indifferent to those intrinsically human values which men cherish. How different, he laments, is the world of experience from the world of the heart's desire! But every intelligent, mature person has to some extent realized the wisdom of curbing his insatiable ego in its demands…. It is therefore an expression of sentimentalism to assume, as Mr. Krutch does, that in winning this knowledge man has forfeited a desirable world for one less desirable to which he must now painfully adapt himself. The truth is otherwise.
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