Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/245

Foreign Influences 227 and romantic literature, an escape from it, a turning one's back | upon its prosaic monotony. But though genuine philosophy i never restricts itself to purely local and temporal affairs, the history of philosophy, as part of the history of the intellectual life of any country, is largely concerned with the life of various national or local traditions, with their growth and struggles, and the interaction between them and the general currents of life into which they must fit, with the general conditions, that is, under which intellectual life is carried on. The main traditions of American philosophy have been ; British, that is, English and Scotch; and the Declaration of ; Independence has had no more influence in the realm of meta- physical speculation than it has had in the realm of our common law. French and German influences have, indeed, not been ! absent. The community of Western civilization which found in Latin its common language has never been completely broken up. But French and German influences have not been any greater in the United States than in Great Britain. Up to very ' recently our philosophers have mostly been theologians, and the latter, like the lawyers, cultivate intense loyalty to ancient traditions. In our early national period French free-thought exercised considerable influence, especially in the South; but the free thought of Voltaire, Condillac, and Volney was, after all, an adaptation of Locke and English deism ; and its American apostles like Thomas Paine," Priestley, and Thomas Cooper were, like Franklin' and Jefferson, characteristically British — as were Hume and Gibbon in their day. This movement of intellectual liberalism was almost completely annihilated in the greater portion of the country by the evangelical or revivalist move- ment. The triumph of revivalism was rendered easier by the weakly organized intellectual life and the economic bankruptcy of the older Southern aristocracy, as reflected in the financial difficulties which embarrassed Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in their old age. The second French wave, the eclectic philo- sophy of Cousin and Jouffroy, was at bottom simply the Scotch realism of Reid and Stewart over again, with only slight traces of Schelling. With the organization of our graduate schools on German models, and With a large number of our teachers taking their » See Book I, Chap. viii. ' See Book I, Chap. vi.