What can we say (though it seem to evade the question) save that America has no scholarship because as yet it has a body but no soul? The scholar goes through all the proper motions,--collects facts, organizes research, delivers lectures, writes articles and sometimes books,--but under this outer seeming there is no inner reality. Under all the great works of culture there broods the quivering soul of tradition, a burden sometimes disturbing and heavy to bear, but more often helping the soul to soar on wings not of its own making. We think hungrily that the freshness of outlook of a young people should be more than compensation; but the freshness is not there. Bad habits long persisted in, or new vices painfully acquired, may pass for traditions among some spokesmen of “Americanism,” but will not breathe the breath of life into a national culture. All is shell, mask, and a deep inner emptiness. We have scholars without scholarship, as there are churches without religion. Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep inner searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted and frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high purpose and special function, and the pride that comes from this realization, can give the scholar his true place in an American world. For this special function is none other than to act as the devoted servant of thought and imagination and to champion their claims as the twin pillars that support all the spiritual activities of human life,--art, philosophy, religion, science; and these it must champion against all the materialists under whatever name they disguise their purpose. What matter whether they be scientists who decry “dialectics,” or sociologists who sneer at “mere belles-lettres,” or practical men who have no use for the “higher life”? Whether they be called bourgeois or radical, conservative or intellectual,--all who would reduce life to a problem of practical activity and physical satisfaction, all who would reduce intellect and imagination to mere instruments of practical usefulness, all who worship dead idols instead of living gods, all who grasp at every flitting will-o’-the-wisp of theory or sensation,--all these alike scholarship must forever recognize as its enemies, and its chief tempters. II