Formal philosophy seemed to him to be "too buttoned-up and
white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast,
slow-breathing, unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its
unknown tides. The freedom we want is not the freedom, with a string
tied to its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that philosophy. Let
it fly away, we say, from _us_. What then?"

To this American there must be a true democracy among the faculties of
the mind. The logical understanding must not be allowed to put on
priggish airs. The feelings have their rights also. "They may be as
prophetic and as anticipatory of truth as anything else we have." There
must be give and take; "what hope is there of squaring and settling
opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground and
admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties,
emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will in
the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose
faculties on the whole had the best divining power?"

Do not those words give us a glimpse of the American mind in its natural
working. Its genius is anticipatory. It is searching for a common ground
on which all may meet. It puts its trust not in the thinker who can put
his thoughts in the most neat form, but the man whose faculties have _on
the whole the best divining power_.

To listen to William James was to experience an illogical elation--and
to feel justified in it. He was an unsparing critic of things as they
are, but his criticism left us in no mood of depression. Our interest is
with things as they are going to be. The universe is growing. Let us
grow with it.