This text is part of:
[239] that a worthy originality can come only through deep acquaintance with the best of ancient and modem thought stands justified by at least one fact. The most original American thinkers, Peirce, Royce, James, and Dewey, were also the most learned, and their first philosophic papers appeared in The journal of speculative philosophy. The general spread of the evolutionary theory, popular science, and more accurate historical acquaintance with European thought affected the American colleges only very slowly. An examination of the catalogues of American colleges will bear out the picture of dismal unenlightenment which Stanley Hall drew in 1879 of the state of philosophic teaching.1 The beginning of a better order of things may be dated from the election of a layman, Charles W. Eliot, as President of Harvard College in 1869 or from the introduction of post-graduate instruction at Johns Hopkins in 1876. As the American colleges began to expand and as training for the educational profession became an important consideration, teachers of philosophy and psychology began to be selected with some regard for professional training and competency rather than exclusively for piety or pastoral experience. Such professional training an increasing number obtained in Germany, where, if they did not always get much fresh wisdom, they did generally learn the meaning of scientific accuracy in experimental psychology and philologic accuracy in the history of philosophy. It was through men of this class that the idealistic philosophy of Kant and Hegel was introduced into the American colleges.2 In this they were aided by the spread of German idealism in the English and Scottish universities, which found expression in the works of J. F. Ferrier, Hutchison Stirling, F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, Bosanquet, John and Edward Caird, Mahaffy, and William Wallace. The definitive triumph of the idealistic movement may be dated from the founding in 1892 of The philosophical Review under the editorship of Jacob Gould Schurman and James Edwin
1 Mind, vol. IV, 1879. Professor Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins has testified that in his youth positions as college teachers were generally given to those who had failed in missionary work abroad.
2 Typical of this class was G. S. Morris, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, translator of Überweg's History of philosophy, and editor of a series of expositions of German philosophic classics by Dewey, Watson, Harris, and Everett
Cambridge University. Press, 1917-1921.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.