The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry

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Title: The American Mind
The E. T. Earl Lectures

Author: Bliss Perry

Release Date: September 10, 2009 [EBook #29952]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE AMERICAN MIND

_The E. T. Earl Lectures_

1912

By the Same Author

The American Mind
Park-Street Papers
John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir
Walt Whitman
The Amateur Spirit
A Study of Prose Fiction
The Powers at Play
The Plated City
Salem Kittredge and Other Stories
The Broughton House

The American Mind

By Bliss Perry

[Illustration: The Riverside Press]

Boston and New York

Houghton Mifflin Company

1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published October 1912_

TO

WALTER MORRIS HART

Preface

_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures
for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and
I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty
of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._

_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the
Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in
American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title
has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of
Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately
perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._

B. P.

CAMBRIDGE, 1912.

Contents

I. RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 3

II. THE AMERICAN MIND 47

III. AMERICAN IDEALISM 86

IV. ROMANCE AND REACTION 128

V. HUMOR AND SATIRE 166

VI. INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 209

THE AMERICAN MIND

I

Race, Nation, and Book

Many years ago, as a student in a foreign universit