We
do not have to cross the Atlantic in order to hunt for the enemies of
American national independence and fulfillment. They sit at our
political fireside and toast their feet on its coals. They poison
American patriotic feeling until it becomes, not a leaven, but a kind of
national gelatine. They enshrine this American democratic ideal in a
temple of canting words which serves merely as a cover for a religion of
personal profit. American moral and intellectual emancipation can be
achieved only by a victory over the ideas, the conditions, and the
standards which make Americanism tantamount to collective
irresponsibility and to the moral and intellectual subordination of the
individual to a commonplace popular average.
The heretics of the Middle Period were not cowardly, but they were
intellectually irresponsible, undisciplined, and inexperienced. Sharing,
as they did, most of the deeper illusions of their time, they did not
vindicate their own individual intellectual independence, and they
contributed little or nothing to American national intellectual
independence.
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