Every science must be an _applied_ science, the intellect must be _applied_ intellect before we thoroughly understand it. We have created an environment in which the intellectual impulses must become fundamentally social in quality and mood, whereas the truth of the matter is that these impulses, like the religious impulse, in their pristine spontaneity are basically individualistic and capricious rather than disciplined. But such individualism in thought, unless mellowed by contact with institutions that assume and cherish it and thus can, without patronizing, correct its wildnesses, inevitably turns into eccentricity. And such, unfortunately, has too often been the history of American intellectuals. The institutional structure that might sustain them and keep them on the main track of the humanistic tradition has been too fragile and too slight. The university and college life, the educational institutions, even the discipline of scholarship, as other essays in this volume show us, have been of very little assistance. Even the church has provoked recalcitrance rather than any real reorientation of religious viewpoint, and our atheists--recall Ingersoll--have ordinarily been quite conventional in their intellectual outlook. With educated Englishmen, for example, whatever their religious, economic, or political views, there has been a certain common tradition or point of departure and understanding, i.e., the classics. Mr. Balfour can speak the same language as Mr. Bertrand Russell, even when he is a member of a government that puts Mr. Russell in gaol for his political opposition to the late war. But it really is a strain on the imagination to picture Mr. Denby quoting Hume to refute Mr. Weeks, or Vice-President Coolidge engaging in an epistemological controversy with Postmaster-General Hays. There is no intellectual background common to President Harding and Convict Debs or to any one person and possibly as many as a hundred others--there are only common social or geographical backgrounds, in which the absence of a real community of interests is pathetically emphasized by grotesque emphasis upon fraternal solidarity, as when Mr. Harding discovered that he and his chauffeur belonged to the same lodge, regarding this purely fortuitous fact as a symbol of the healing power of the Fathers and of American Democracy!