On the one hand, there is the influence of the
original Puritans--whether of New England or of the South--, who came to
the New World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity,
positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such a
position of political and intellectual leadership that they were able
to force it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and to endow it
with such vitality that it successfully resisted alien opposition later
on. And on the other hand, one sees a complex of social and economic
conditions which worked in countless irresistible ways against the rise
of that dionysian spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that
philosophy of the _Ja-sager_, which offers to Puritanism, today as in
times past, its chief and perhaps only effective antagonism. In other
words, the American of the days since the Revolution has had Puritanism
diligently pressed upon him from without, and at the same time he has
led, in the main, a life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to
it, or at all events to its salient principles, within.
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