The appropriate occasion for the
transfer was postponed until after American political independence had
been secured; and when occasion did not arise, the naturalness of the
transfer was perverted and obscured by political preconceptions.
The foregoing considerations throw a new light upon the mistake made by
the American heretics of the Middle Period. In so far as their assertion
of American intellectual independence was negative, it should not have
been a protest against "feudalism," social classification, social and
individual discipline, approved technical methods, or any of those
social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely
believed to be exclusively European. It should have been a protest
against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism--the Americanism of
national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism. The bondage
from which Americans needed, and still need, emancipation is not from
Europe, but from the evasions, the incoherence, the impatience, and the
easy-going conformity of their own intellectual and moral traditions.
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