Note 297 — Chapter VII · PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM

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).