in the lines of Emerson I have taken as epigraph for "Litera-
ture and the American College":

There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.

On its negative side my argument is directed against this undue
emphasis on the "law for thing," against the attempt to erect on
naturalistic foundations a complete philosophy of life. I define
two main forms of naturalism--on the one hand, utilitarian
and scientific and, on the other, emotional naturalism. The
type of romanticism I am studying is inseparably bound up
with emotional naturalism.

This type of romanticism encouraged by the naturalistic
movement is only one of three main types I distinguish and I
am dealing for the most part with only one aspect of it. But
even when thus circumscribed the subject can scarcely be said
to lack importance; for if I am right in my conviction as to the
unsoundness of a Rousseauistic philosophy of life, it follows
that the total tendency of the Occident at present is away from
rather than towards civilization.

On the positive side, my argument aims to reassert the "law
for man," and its special discipline against the various forms
of naturalistic excess. At the very mention of the word disci-
pline I shall be set down in certain quarters as reactionary. But
does it necessarily follow from a plea for the human law that
one is a reactionary or in general a traditionalist? An American
writer of distinction was once heard to remark that he saw in
the world to-day but two classes of persons, -- the mossbacks
and the mountebanks, and that for his part he preferred to be
a mossback. One should think twice before thus consenting to
seem a mere relic of the past. The ineffable smartness of our
young radicals is due to the conviction that, whatever else

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