But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always
has a comic and an unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and
verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and
emotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged. Or when the
child is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of
his own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh
mentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to
reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly
despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses
the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary
philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities
of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or
of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy
has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed
has caught the stale odour from it. America is not simply, as I said a
moment ago, a young country with an old mentality: it is a country
with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and
discoveries of the younger generations.
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