Their reports of vague meanderings in the border-land were listened to without scorn.  They might be ever so absent-minded and yet have stumbled upon something which wiser men had missed.  No one was more keen to criticize the hard-and-fast dogmas of the wise and prudent or more willing to learn what might, by chance, have been revealed unto babes.  The one thing he demanded was space.  His universe must not be finished or inclosed.  After a rational system had been formulated and declared to be the Whole, his first instinct was to get away from it.  He was sure that there must be more outside than there was inside.  “The ‘through-and-through’ universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible, impeccable all-pervasiveness.  Its necessity with no possibilities, its relations with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights.”

Formal philosophy seemed to him to be “too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast, slow-breathing, unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.  The freedom we want is not the freedom, with a string tied to its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that philosophy.  Let it fly away, we say, from us.  What then?”

To this American there must be a true democracy among the faculties of the mind.  The logical understanding must not be allowed to put on priggish airs.  The feelings have their rights also.  “They may be as prophetic and as anticipatory of truth as anything else we have.”  There must be give and take; “what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground and admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will in the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?”

Do not those words give us a glimpse of the American mind in its natural working.  Its genius is anticipatory.  It is searching for a common ground on which all may meet.  It puts its trust not in the thinker who can put his thoughts in the most neat form, but the man whose faculties have on the whole the best divining power.

To listen to William James was to experience an illogical elation—­and to feel justified in it.  He was an unsparing critic of things as they are, but his criticism left us in no mood of depression.  Our interest is with things as they are going to be.  The universe is growing.  Let us grow with it.

THE UNACCUSTOMED EARS OF EUROPE

I

When, as a child, I learned the Westminster Catechism by heart I found the Ten Commandments easy to remember.  There was something straightforward in these prohibitions.  Once started in the right direction one could hardly stray from the path.  But I stumbled over the question, in regard to certain Commandments, “What are the reasons annexed?”