Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/246

 228 Later Philosophy doctors' degrees in Germany, Germanic terms and mannerisms gained an apparent ascendancy in our philosophic teachings ' and writings; but in its substance, philosophy in America has followed the modes prevailing in Great Britain. The first serious attempt to introduce German philosophy into this country came with Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1829), and I the apologetic tone of President Marsh's introductory essay showed how powerfully the philosophy of Locke and Reid had become entrenched as a part of the Christian thought of Amer- ica. Some acquaintance with German philosophy was shown by New England radicals like Theodore Parker, ' but in the main their interest in things Germanic was restricted to the realm of belles-lettres, biblical criticism, and philology. Though some stray bits of Schelling's romantic nature-philosophy be- came merged in American transcendentalism, the latter was really a form of Neoplatonism directly descended from the Cam- bridge platonism of More and Cudworth. Hickok's Rational Psychology (1848) is our only philosophic work of the first two- thirds of the nineteenth century to show any direct and serious assimilation of Kant's thought. Hickok, however, professes to reject the whole transcendental philosophy, and, in the niain, the Kantian elements in his system are no larger than in the writings of British thinkers like Hamilton and Whewell. The Hegelian influence, which made itself strongly felt in the work of William T. Harris, was even more potent in Great Britain. In 1835 De Tocqueville reported that in no part of the civil- ' ized world was less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. " Whether because of absorption in the material conquest of a vast continent, or because of a narrow orthodoxy which was then hindering free intellectual life in England as well as in the United States, the fact remains that nowhere else were free theoretic inquiries held in such little honour. As our colleges were originally all sectarian or denominational, clergy-/ men occupied all the chairs of philosophy. Despite the multi-' tude of sects, the Scottish common-sense philosophy introduced j at the end of the eighteenth century at Princeton by Presi-' ' See Book II, Chap. viii. "One gets the same impression from Harriet Martineau's Society in America and fr-jm the account of Philarfete Chasles.