. This has been said of us on the Continent. It is not so. We do
not study the art of fishing in troubled waters. The waiting habit in
our transactions, domestic as well as foreign, arises from our
inveterate preference for thinking in images rather than in concepts. We
put off decisions until the whole of the facts can be visualized. This
carries with it that we often do not act until it is very late. Our
gifts enable us to move with energy, if not always with precision. To
predict what we will do in a given case is not easy for a foreigner. It
is not easy even for ourselves. We have few abstract principles, and
reliable induction from our past is not easy. We are often guided by
what Mr. Justice Wendell Holmes has called "the intuition more subtle
than any particular major premise." Nor is help to be derived from any
study of our general outlook on life, for that outlook is hard to
formulate even to ourselves.

Now all this, our peculiar gift, if kept under control, may well have
its practical advantage, but, as the case stands, it is apt to bring in
its train a good deal of disadvantage. In periods when nations are
trying to render firm the basis of peace by remolding and giving
precision to their aims, so that these can be made common aims, lack of
definiteness in national ideals is a sure source of embarrassment. At a
time when democracy is more and more claiming in terms to occupy the
whole field it becomes increasingly desirable that the higher purposes
of democracy should become clear to the people themselves. For the
practise of a country can never be wholly divorced from its theory of
life. The tendencies of the national will are bound up with the nation's
science, with its literature, with its art, and with its religion. These
tendencies are affected by the capacity of the nation to understand and
express its own soul. Beyond science, literature, art and religion there
lies something that may be called the national philosophy, a disposition
rather than a definite creed. This sort of philosophy is different in
France from what it is in Germany, and in Germany from what it is in the
English-speaking countries. The philosophy of a people takes shape in
the attitude its leaders adopt in their estimation of values and of the
order in which they should be placed. And this turns on the conceptions
and ideas which are current in the various departments of mental
activity. It is thus that a philosophy of life has to be