Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/20

4 for law, in the American union of half a hundred "sovereign" commonwealths with all their county and town governments under one federal head, in the American churches with their democratic organization and their multifarious and plastic creeds, in American freedom of thought and speech which has always tended to build and not merely to destroy; then one can scarcely imagine where they are to be found, even in approximation, among the peoples of the earth.

That a combination of endowments, culture, and circumstances, so favorable to the development of Philosophy, should exist in a nation numbering between sixty and seventy millions, is a most hopeful augury for the future of human civilization. We are not required, however, to nourish our spirits on expectation merely. The signs and omens already move towards their fulfilment. What is prefigured in the conditions is even now becoming the hatch and brood of time. Never before in our history has there been so deep and so widely diffused an interest in philosophical subjects. The light, unreflective, optimistic mood of earlier days may not have deserted us, but we cannot conceal the fact that the nation enters upon the second century of its career with a new feeling of unrest and a temper of greater seriousness and reflection. We see old things pass away; and we are not yet adjusted to the new things of theory and practice, of science and scholarship, of social, moral, and religious life. With characteristic quickness and intensity, we have set our faces towards first principles, if so be we may gain a new understanding of men's relations to one another and to God, of the nature of the soul and of the world, of all that is and of man's knowledge of what is. The more obvious symptoms of this philosophical renascence, apart from the general