Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/244

CHAPTER XVII Later Philosophy THE prevailing other-worldliness of American philosophers 1 seems to be the only explanation for our failure to develop an original and vigorous political philosophy to meet our unique political experience. On a priori grounds it seems indisputable that philosophy must share the charac- teristics of the life of which it is a part and on which it is its business to reflect. But we actually do not know with certainty ,' what kind of philosophy any given set of historic conditions will always produce. Thus no one has convincingly pointed out any direct and really significant influence on American philosophy exercised by our colonial organization, by the Re- volutionary War, by the slavery struggle, by the Civil War, by our unprecedented immigration, or by the open frontier life which our historians now generally regard as the key to American history. The fact that, excepting some passages in Calhoun, ' none of our important philosophic writings mentions the existence of slavery or of the negro race, that liberal demo- cratic philosophers like Jefferson^ could continue to own and even sell slaves and still fervently believe that all men are created free and equal, ought to serve as a reminder of the air-tight compartments into which the human mind is fre- 1 quently divided, and of the extent to which one's professed philosophy can be entirely disconnected from the routine of one's daily occupation. Indeed, it would seem that most of our philosophy is not a reflection on life but, like music or Utopian . ' See Book II, Chap. xv. The keen pamphlet on Slavery and Freedom by A. T. Bledsoe, the most versatile of our Southern philosophers, and the references to the ethics of slavery in Wayland's Moral Philosophy, can hardly be considered as derogating from the statement in the text. " See Book I, Chap. viii. 226