[297] It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which it rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to think and speak of the _apparently_ purely “economic” or “business-like” character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote Professor Bliss Perry here ... “_the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated business-man face_ [italics mine], the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd” (p. 158). “There exists, in other words, _in all classes of American society to-day_, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the ‘transcendental’ movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised, unvitalised American manhood and womanhood” (p. 160). [298] And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of “personality” and of the “self.” [299] At the moment of his death (_scribens est mortuus_) James was undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked-about English-speaking philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home of the transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked. Stein says, for example, in his article upon “Pragmatism” (_Archiv für Philosophie_, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we “have had nothing like it since Schopenhauer.” I have often thought that James and his work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers (and along with the “lead” that America now certainly has over at least England in some departments of study, like political and economic science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of the training of many of her best professors--a debt she has long since cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more authentic information about James and his work than the present writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may peruse either the recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, or the work of M. Flournoy already spoken of. Boutroux has a fine appreciation of the value of James’s philosophical work in the work to which I have already referred. And there was naturally a crop of invaluable articles upon James in the American reviews shortly after his death. [300] Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there from a teacher like Agassiz: “The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world’s concrete fulness that I have never been able to forget it.”--From an article upon James in the _Journal of Philosophy_, ix. p. 527.