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COMPARED with the United States, historiography in England is a minor matter, a hobby, a respectable activity but not big business, not one of the pillars of the state. We have no real equivalents to the State historical societies . . . no great scholarly enterprises . . . on the scale of the Washington or Jefferson papers or the promised edition of Franklin's works . . . The United States is, in a special sense, a creation of history . . . Then, in a country of such diverse racial origins, 'history' is an historical necessity . . . Polish tobacco farmers in the Connecticut River valley must be given by history a spiritual kinship with the East Anglians who shook the dust of Massachusetts as well as of Lincoln shire from their feet . . . But [American history], because of its prominence, is also in danger. It is called on, too often and too loudly, to perform specific patriotic tasks . . . The danger is . . . that the American people will seek in the past, not merely an explanation of the present, but a kind of Sibylline book in which ready . . . answers will be found to problems, some of which are so novel that no answer can be found in history."
ON PHILOSOPHY
THE most fruitful purely American element in recent philosophy has probably been the gradual discovery of [Charles Sanders] Peirce. His persistent concern with logic has joined with the stimulus of the Russell-Whitehead investigations into mathematical logic in provoking a vigorous development of logical studies . . . There is certainly life in American philosophy. Although no second thinker of the calibre of Peirce has yet made an appearance, there is no reason why one should not turn up at any time."