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the mind. Now, neither the court of Rome nor its clerical legions extended over Europe, are in the first ranks of the intellectual, scientific, and learned world. The American catholic clergy shares the common fate, but in a larger degree, and is inferior to its European confraternity. The greatest number of them seem rather indifferent tó enlightening themselves, or to lessening the ignorance of their rude flocks. It seems to be of small or secondary interest to them to have enlightened congregations. They aim rather at preserving and nursing the mental stupidity for the greater glory of Rome and for their own security. Some do this it may be said innocently, not aware of a better aim, but the hierarchy has fixed and well defined purposes. The hierarchy wants among its ordained officials, as well as among the flocks, submission, willing and pliant tools, and not self-conscious individualities. The means of education for the Romanist clergy are inferior in every respect to the like establishments in Europe. The very insufficient diocesan seminaries are generally directed by Jesuits. The history of this militant, aggressive order, so unrelenting in the prosecution of power, shows that one of the cardinal objects in education is to prepare and drill the mind to an absolute dependence, to crush out, extinguish any spark of self-judgment, not only in the laity but likewise in the clergy, and above all in the secular clergy. In this spirit is directed the public education in the jesuitical establishments, as well as in the seminaries. The pupils of each must be so shaped out as to remain for life unshaken in their faith in the supremacy of the fathers. A secular priest, who after all is to be let loose into the world, entering a community breathing self-consciousness, self-reliance, where the power of reason is recognized as paramount; such a priest, thrown among such temptations, must be penetrated through and through with the

conviction of his inferiority, that he must always seek and cling to the decision of his tutors and masters, that he must remain for ever a tool, unaware of his individuality. He must never be able to appeal to his own reason, judgment, and mental initiative. So his general information is limited, mangled, defective. He is inspired and wholly schooled to be distrustful of the light of his own reason, as well as to suspect learning and knowledge when illuminated or vivified by it. He, as well as the flocks confided to his care, must never discover that reason and mind alone constitute the difference between man and brute; that if there is any truth in the supposed or admitted likeness between the Creator and the creature, this likeness is absolutely spiritual, based on the faculty of reason. The priest and the flock must never discover that reason and mind are the highest gifts, and that faith at the best is only the corollary of a mind actuated by reason.

The Romanist clergy is unrelenting in its activityrather a mechanical one-under the direction of the hierarchy, under the inspiration of the Jesuits. Some halo of devotion and self-sacrifice surrounded and embellished years ago the labors and life of the secular Romanist clergy. They shared the poverty, the gross abjectness, of their parishioners, and still, in many instances, their material destitution equals the mental one. With the material

progress and conditional prosperity of the Romanist population, a sensible amelioration has taken place in the worldly situation of its clergy; but the mental emancipation of flocks and shepherds is for a long time out of the question.

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THE genuine American mind is the sum of various components, intuitive as well as objective in their source, and in their operations. Various inward and external combinations, events and conjunctures, have added to the English substratum, new, diversified, spiritual, and so to say, corporeal terms and substances. In its present stage of development, this alloy reveals an inward struggle between the substratum and the affluxes. This progress of effervescence, and the consequent internal and external phenomena, taken in general outlines, constitute the dissimilarity of the American mind, from the special characteristics of the mind of each European nation. The contending forces in the American mind manifest themselves in various ways, and in efforts for asserting individuality, originality, and an independent mode of perception. Nevertheless the substratum maintains its ground, yielding slowly and stubbornly to the pressure of the elements which accumulate upon it. In the oscillations produced by this struggle, originate those contrasts which mark more or less distinctly the intellectual manifestations.

The American mind tends pre-eminently towards the objective, at times however being given to the subjective, even to abstract speculation. It is singularly impulsive and receptive, seizes eagerly upon the most antagonistic

objects, and embraces them with considerable elasticity. Expansive, and at times daring, it is less disciplined and subdued by routine, than is the case with the English mind. Hitherto the American mind has not reached the elevated stand-point of an absolute, intuitive individuality. Stimulated by the fulness and vigor of intuitiveness, but open to the breathing influences of outward nature, to the ever freshly pouring combinations of events, the mind ascends slowly, step by step, into the expanding region of normal self-consciousness. It is inquisitive, analytic, dismembering, and still eager often to discover, to comprehend a general law, to accept general formulas and axioms, and to submit to them. It grapples willingly with difficulties, but is not however always enduring or patient enough to overcome and subdue them, above all when the difficulties are founded in merely abstract, speculative combinations. Evoked to self-conscious activity, the American mind was 'thrown at the start into a stern and rough medium, and cut off from the motherland; it was obliged to direct all its intensity to struggles with nature, with destructive matter, was forced to choose and decide swiftly, to act, and not to remain in musing contemplation.

Immediate practical results are more attractive for the American mind, although not exclusively, than the charms of imagination. In its intellectual, positive turn, it yields easily to the pressure of outward events and combinations. Intellect finds more food, more stimulus, in externalities, and therefore it overpowers the spirit, the imagination, as well as the tendency to abstract, interior contemplation. Of great mobility, expansive but not deep, the American mind as yet seems unable to seize thoroughly and penetrate deeply into the infinity of intuitive ideas, engrossed as it has hitherto been by sensations. The social condition, the primitive state of nature, opening uninterruptedly

her wider and wider circles before the Americans, challenge and attract the intellectual powers, carry away the activity into one general, explorative, mechanical, commercial current. But then even, a certain inborn elasticity redeems and saves it from utter degradation. And so, notwithstanding this seemingly all-absorbing commercial propensity, the mind of the people at large does not become eaten up or narrowed, as is the case, for example, with the immense majority of the various commercial classes in Europe. The so-called petty shopkeeper spirit does not prevail in America to the same extent as in most of the European parent countries.

Excitability, omnipotent in the American character, scarcely affects the activity of mind. The keen internal perception of the object strongly resists excitability or nervousness, and dispels the mist that has been aroused. If the Americans do not resist but yield to the current of excitement, it is more from want of independence, than from want of a sound, internal, mental judgment. Comparatively rapid and comprehensive in assimilation and combination-far more so than the English-the American mind seems to be indifferent to method; at the same time, by a striking contrast, the intellect is disciplined by it in most of its mechanical dealings with the realm of matter. Though not absolutely rigorous in its operations, the American mind is earnest, giving fixity and ballast, and forming a counterpoise to the often febrile unrest of character.

The various peculiarities of the American mind, the outbursts of its originality and independence, are manifested more generally and freely in the people at large, in its promptings and impulses, than in those which are commonly considered as the representative minds, the literary stars, or any other exponents of the spiritual or imagina

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