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272 tures, its rains and calms, its darknesses and stagnations, while the storms and cloudbursts are the European wars and revolutions. But I fear that Americans must be forced to take an interest in this weather, since somehow there will begin to be, not a European and an American weather, each independent of the other, but one general condition spreading over the whole planet. And I fear that to understand this meteorology they must learn to read more and more in the heavy tome of our (the European) intellectual life. Now to be sure, this book contains an unending amount of things which touch on the past; in fact, in the pages of this book the past and the present seem almost inseparable—a disturbing factor for the American attitude, which is based entirely on the present and derives so much momentary strength from this position. But nevertheless I fear that the American—I] mean the American who wants in some way to lay his hand on the hilt of present and future intellectual forces—cannot avoid puzzling over this old and heavy book. And his incentive will not be in the lukewarm pious deference which he owes to the intellectual situation in Europe because it has always lain behind his own experiences as a historical past, an hypothesis; but a much stronger and more feverish motive will impel him. In some day not far off, with the keenness of a besetting fever, with the poignancy of a dream, and the oppression of a nightmare, he will become conscious that all these European matters are by no means things of an unrelated past, but the living and fermenting present, a ferment in which so tremendously much of the past is a factor. He will see that this European present is also his American future, from which there is so little chance of his withdrawing himself or withdrawing his great young sea-encircled continent; that, rather, all the potentialities and catastrophes of geographic and racial destiny which are slumbering in this young continent will be released through no other conflagrations than that of Europe's intellectual future. We are now facing such an effect of the intellectual undercurrent of Europe upon the intellectual undercurrent of America. (I speak of processes which are worked out on a quite different plane from the relatively harmless economic crises and the almost stupid and inane vicissitudes of current politics.) The symptoms are manifesting themselves here and there, but to be sure they make a tremendously innocent and, in comparison with such great matters of the world's future, an almost trivial showing. I mean the gradual penetration of American imaginative life by the strong,