essed thinkers. The best
philosopher is the man who can think most _simply_. ... I wish that
people would consider that thought--and philosophy is no more than
good and methodical thought--is a matter _intimate_ to them, a portion
of their real selves ... that they would _value_ what they think, and
be interested in it.... In my own opinion,' he goes on, 'there is
something depressing in this weight of learning, with nothing that can
come into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the opinion of such
and such a person long ago. ... I can conceive of nothing more noxious
for students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves about
their ordinary philosophic thought, Oh, somebody must have thought it
all before.'[3] Yet this is the habit most encouraged at our seats of
learning. You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's; you
must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your
rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all
spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed.
Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent
dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is
appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and
manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you
will hark back to the more humane english tradition. American students
have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual
effort in later life. Some of us have done so. Some of the younger
ones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habits
already.

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion with
the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition
only. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who
has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and
eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the
subject like a fly in amber. All later comers have the duty of quoting
him and measuring their opinions with his opinion. Such are the rules
of the professorial game--they think and write from each other and for
each other and at each other exclusively. With this exclusion of the
open air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and oddities count
as much as sanities, and command the same attention; and if by chance
any one writes popularly and about results only, with his mind
directly focus