"There are open hours
When God's will sallies free
And the dull idiot may see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years."

This is the American doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" spiritually
discerned.


V

But one need not go so far back as Emerson to see the higher reaches of
the American temperament. Perhaps in no one have they been revealed with
more distinctness than in William James. There are those who consider it
dispraise of a philosopher to suggest that his work has local color.
However that may be, William James thought as an American as certainly
as Plato thought as a Greek. His way of philosophizing was one that
belonged to the land of his birth.

He was as distinctly American as was Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone was no
renegade taking to the woods that he might relapse into savagery. He was
a civilized man who preferred to be the maker of civilization rather
than to be its victim. He preferred to blaze his own way through the
forest. When he saw the smoke of a neighbor's chimney it was time for
him to move on. So William James was led by instinct from the crowded
highways to the dim border-lands of human experience. He preferred to
dwell in the debatable lands. With a quizzical smile he listened to the
dignitaries of philosophy. He found their completed systems too stuffy.
He loved the wildernesses of thought where shy wild things hide--half