The Intellectual Life of America.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 914, 6 September 1889, Page 9

The Intellectual Life of America.

(New Princeton Review, New York ) In his essay, 'On Liberty,’ published thirty years ago, Mill dwelt on the despo* tism of custom as a standing hindrance to human advancement, and on the fact that it is their remarkable diversity of charaeter and ®ulture which ‘baa made the European

family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary, portion of mankind,’ diversity not only of one nation from another, but also among the people of which each is composed. But ho called attention tor the fact that ‘ the circumstances which surround different classes and individuals, and shape their characters, are daily becoming more assimilated,’ to the detriment of that development of their individual faculties and powers upon which the improvement and elevation of society mainly dspend, and to the confirming of the preponderance of an average, common-place of type of character, undistinguished by spsoial excellence and deficient in originality. This assimilation has gone on more rapidly than ever during the generation which has past since Mill wrote, aurl nowhere with more rapidity than in America. The general tendency of modern civilisation, which he pointed out, to render mediocrity the ascendent power in society, has received no check, but seems, rather, to become steadily more positive, and is exhibited on the largest scale in America. Nor is it merely the ascendent power of mediocrity which is a characteristic feature of our actual civilisation, but associated with it Is an increase of vulgarity, by which I mean a predominance of the taste and standards of. judgment of the uneducated and unrefined masses, over those of the more enlightened and better-instructed few. The material prosperity of the multitude, and the unexampled concentration of interest on material ends, have combined with the levelling tendency of democratic institutions, not merely to raise the iow to a comparatively high plane of material and, in some respects, of moral existence, but also to compel the high to adapt themselves to a comparatively low plane of intellectual life. Quantity tells against quality. The just balance of values is not preserved. The principle of equality is extended into regions where it has no proper validity. Our public life, our literature, our journals, our churches, our amusements, our politics, all exhibit a marked condescension to the crowd, an adaptation jp popular demands. There is a lack of independence and of leading ; a lack of superior excellence in the nobler fields of effort and expression.. The American people are not to be blamed or condemned for this condition of things, any more than they are to be blamed for living on a new continent. Those only among us are 'to be blamed who, having better opportunities for self-culture than the great body of their countrymen, receiving better education, understanding better the meaning of things, acaept with indifference the conditions of inferiority, and make no effort to raise the general standards of character and of conduct. For this condition is not one that mainly concerns matters of taste, and standards of judgment in respect to external and trivial affairs. It concerns the whole of our national life. The lack of intellectual elevation and of moral discrimination is a source of national weakness. The prevalence of vulgarity is a national disgrace. The earth has never presented a scene of more superb and widespread affluence than that which is to-day displayed in the great West, which has already become the chief seat of the power, as well as of the wealth of our country. Nature has the ce-offered the most splendid opportunities to human energies, and, during a hundred years, men have had perfect security and freedom in the enjoyment of these opportunities. They have succeeded in building up commonwealth after commonwealth in which there is almost universal material wall-being. Ifc is right and easy to sing paeans over such, achievements. It is difficult for those who have accomplished, and who share in, Buch success, not to become elated with it. But the West is at a great disadvantage as regards civilisation, in the very fact of the vast scale and enormous growth of her prosperity. The imagination of her people haß been touched by them, and their ideas have been Bhaped by them. Cut off by her impregnabfe position from direct relation with the seats of former oulture, with no elevated traditions of her own, removed from the immediate Influence of foreign interests, the West has naturally grown up insensible, in great measure, to the higher responsibilities involved in her [unexampled opportunities, and comparatively indifferent to her share in the common inheritance of the treasures of thought and experience of the race. She has subordinated the concerns of the spirit to those of the body, and she is now paying the penalty, in the possession of wealth without due sense of its right use, in the dim, selfreproachful recognition of aims and instincts of the spirit long stunted by want of exercise, which now vaguely seek for satisfaction, and, finally, in the development of a popular life without resources, without elevation, without interest. The very energy displayed in the attainment of material things may, indeed, now that the means of culture have been so abundantly secured, exhibit itself in acquiring the culture itself. Yet the prevailiDg spirit of the West, as shown in its public utterances, in its journals, in its poetry, in its politics, is not promising. It is not modest; it is not serious; it is not large-minded ; it is not high-minded. In a word, it exaggerates the defects in the spirit and temper of the country at large. On the solution of the problem how this spirit is to be improved, how the dangers resulting from materialism, and from the mediocrity and vulgarity that too frequently accompany equality, are to be removed or lessoned, and on the application of the solution, the future of our country depends. Much may be hoped from the dissatisfaction with the barrenness that now prevails in the fields of the higher intellectual life, from the lack- of interest, and from the absence of large original sources of pleasure, refreshment, and invigoration of the spirit. And the more this dissatisfaction is felt, the more clear should be the recognition that the most direct remedy lies in the wider diffusion of the higher education, —that education by which the powers of thought are developed, aad the moral energies strengthened and rightly directed.