We might begin by suggesting the importance to the world of the production and development of a man of genius like James,[299] whose fresh and living presentation of the problems of philosophy (as seen by a psychologist) has brought the sense of a lasting and far-reaching obligation upon his fellow-students everywhere. In no more favourable soil could James have grown up into the range and plenitude of his influence than in that of America and of Harvard University,[300] that great nursing-ground of the finest kind of American imperialism. The great thing, of course, about James was his invasion, through the activities of his own personality,[301] of the realm of philosophical rationalism by the fact and the principle of active personality. His whole general activity was a living embodiment of the principle of all humanism, that personality and the various phases of personal experience are of more importance to philosophy in the way of theory than any number of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract systems, than any amount of reasoning that is determined solely by the ideal of conceptual consistency. Then again, it might be held that the entire academic world of to-day has a great deal to learn from the conditions under which all subjects (philosophy included) are taught and investigated in the typical American university of the day. We have referred to the fact that the American professor or investigator faces the work of instruction and research in an environment replete with all modern facilities and conveniences.[302] The very existence of this environment along with the presence throughout his country of university men and workers from all over the world with all their obvious merits and defects as “social types” prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery to some one school of thought, to some one method of research that is so often a characteristic of the scholar of the old world. The entire information and scholarship in any one science (say, philosophy) is worth to him what he can make of it, here and now, for himself and for his age and for his immediate environment. He simply cannot think of any idea or any line of reflection, in his own or in any other field, without thinking at the same time of its “consequences,” immediate, secondary, and remote. This inability is an instance of the working of the pragmatist element in scholarship and in thought with all its advantages and disadvantages.[303]