Note 305 — Chapter VII · PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM

The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and writing about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of the peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism and Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly “intellectualistic” manner in which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle have often been presented to our British students—under the influence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the doctrinairism and the intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of such a recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation of Religion to Philosophy (From Religion to Philosophy, Arnold, 1912), or of Professor Burnet’s well-known Early Greek Philosophy.