By William James
THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED, by William James, published in McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXX, p.419.Reprinted in Scott and Zeitlin,College Readings in English Prose, New York, MacMillan Company, 1920, pp. 137-144.
William James （1842-1910）, American psychologist and philosopher, the brother of Henry James （1843-1916）, novelist and essayist. In 1890 William James published his epoch-making Principles of Psychology in which the germs of his philosophy are already discernible. His fascinating style, his broad culture and cosmopolitanism made him the most influential American thinker of his day.
Of what use is a college training? We who have had it seldom hear the question raised—we might be a little nonplused to answer it offhand. A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you is this—that it should help you to know a good man when you see him. This is as true of women's as of men's colleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I shall now endeavor to show.
What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college education and the education which business or technical or professional schools confer? The college education is called higher because it is supposed to be so general and so disinterested. At the “schools” you get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the “colleges” give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which phrases of that sort try to express. You are made into an efficient instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but, apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, on the other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make “good company” of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we hear among college-trained people when they compare their education with every other sort. Now, exactly how much does this signify?
It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional training does something more for a man than to make a skilful practical tool of him—it makes him also a judge of other men's skill. Whether his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line, as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work, clean work, finished work;feeble work, slack work, sham work—these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.
Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college training? Is there any broader line—since our education claims primarily not to be “narrow”—in which we also are made good judges between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the “humanities,” and these are often identified with Greek and Latin. But it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin have any general humanity value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense, the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, and mechanics are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
The sifting of human creations! —nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and when we see how perse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms “better” and “worse” may signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel that pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. What the colleges—teaching humanities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant—should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent—this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to pine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.
The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line, as boring subways is the engineer's line and the surgeon's is appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheap Jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what I said: it should enable us to know a good man when we see him.
That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is this line more than any other. “The people in their wisdom”—this is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and the picture-papers of the European continent are already drawing Uncle Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. The privileged aristocracies to the foretime, with all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. But when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private corners. They will have no general influence. They will be harmless eccentricities.
Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. Our better men shall show the way and we shall follow them;so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him.
The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors active in human progress. Inpiduals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world. Our democratic problem thus is statable in ultra-simple terms: Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders? We and our leaders are the x and the y of the equation here; all other historic circumstances, be they economical, political, or intellectual, are only the background of occasion on which the living drama works itself out between us.
In this very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself; we more than others should be able to pine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird's-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. In our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnæ of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. We have continuous traditions, as they have; our motto, too, is noblesse oblige;and, unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own class-consciousness.“Les intellectuels! ”What prouder club-name could there be than this one, used ironically by the party of “red blood,” the party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the anti-Dreyfus craze, to satirize the men in France who still retained some critical sense and judgment! Critical sense, it has to be confessed, is not an exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. Affections for old habit, currents of self-interest, and gales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving; and the pressure of the judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant energy. But the affections, passions, and interests are shifting, successive, and distraught;they blow in alteration while the pilot's hand is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the leeways lie is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. A small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these work inconsistently. The ceaseless whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, give them but time, must warp the world in their direction.
This bird's-eye view of the general steering function of the college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a wider vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. If we are to be the yeast cake for democracy's dough, if we are to make it rise with culture's preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails. We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.
Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: “You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind.” Well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly;but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain—a pretty poor place, possibly—in the whole policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it.
We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. In Edith Wyatt's exquisite book of Chicago sketches called Every One His Own Way, there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, Richard Elliot and his feminine counterpart—feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. Possibly this type of culture may exist near Cambridge and Boston, there may be specimens there, for priggishness is just like painter's colic or any other trade disease. But every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It does so by its general tone being too hearty for the microbe's life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains—under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. If a college, through the inferior human influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops; democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear.
“Tone,” to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their tone are all things human either lost or saved. If democracy is to be saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative inpiduals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.
In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have formidable competitors outside. McClure's Magazine, the American Magazine, Collier's Weekly and, in its fashion, the World's Work, constitute together a real popular university along this very line. It would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like these: “By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and for the clarification of their human sympathies and elevation of their human preferences, the people at large acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private literary adventures, commonly designated in the market by the affectionate name of ‘ten-cent magazines.'”
Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this? Vague as the phrase of knowing a good man when you see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its application, is there any other formula that describes so well the result at which our institutions ought to aim? If they do that, they do the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail in very deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If our faculties and graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less obscurely groping, a great clearness would be shed over many of their problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system, it would embark upon a new career of strength.
Notes
hear the question raised, hear the question brought up or asked.
nonplused, puzzled; reduced to hopeless perplexity.
offhand, without previous study or preparation; extempore.
pithiest, most forceful; concise; most terse.
on your respect, in your particular case; with respect to you.
aspire, desire earnestly; hope.
women's as of men's colleges, because very often there are separate colleges for men and women.
abstraction, theory; an idea stripped of its concrete accompaniments, sometimes visionary.
historical perspective, the faculty of seeing into things from a point of view that is based upon the evidence or investigation of history.
petroleum, rock oil, kerosene.
suffuse, overspread, as with a fluid, tinge, or tint; fill.
“good company” of you mentally, so train your mind that you are a more pleasant companion to talk with.
boorish or caddish mind. Boorish refers to gross lack of breeding or to rudeness of manner; caddish refers to low-brow, presuming, mean, vulgar manners. A person with a boorish or caddish mind is one who is not fit companion to talk with because his interests are so narrowed down to the mean and vulgar things of life.
how much does this signify? How much of this is true, worth while?
pleading at the bar, that is what the lawyer does.
second-rate, second class; not of the best.
first-rate, first class; of the best.
in his own line, in his own field of interest or business; in his own profession.
slack, loose, careless.
sham, unsound, false.
beget, give birth to; produce; give rise to.
line of us, our interest; that which concerns us.
“narrow, ” not broad in scope or view; illiberal.
“humanities, ” the branches of polite learning, especially the ancient classics; those studies which aim to appeal to our reason, polite literature having to do with human beings and teaching a reasoned attitude towards life.
masterpieces, the best works; the best things written.
primacy, prime or first, as in time, place, rank, etc.; hence, excellency, supremacy.
being little more than, a little bit more than; being somewhat more than.
chronicle, record, history.
successive achievements, accomplishments which follow one after the other.
The sifting of human creations! Taking that which human beings have brought into existence and separating the finer things from the coarser things.
biography, the lives of persons as a branch of literature.
politics, dealing with the laws and organization of the state and also with the administration of the state and its laws.
stood the test of time, made trial of for a length of time and have been found excellent.
durable, of lasting quality; strong.
quests of perfection, looking for, searching for perfection.
gain a richer sense, come better to appreciate.
less fanatical, more tolerant.
pathos, that quality of human experience which awakens feelings of pity, sympathy, and tender sorrow.
lost causes, causes which have not had a successful issue; unsuccessful causes.
misguided epochs, ages which have suffered because those who were leaders had been misguided, had a wrong or mistaken idea as to where their duty lay.
pregnant, having a hidden meaning; significant; suggestive.
disesteem, low estimation, inclining to dislike.
cheap and trashy, of low esteem and worthless or useless.
impermanent, not permanent.
ideal values, values which answer to one's highest conception.
blind prig or vulgarian. A person who is unwilling or unable to understand or judge, and is narrowly and self-consciously engrossed in his own mental or spiritual attainments is a blind prig. A vulgarian is a coarse, unrefined person.
scent out, discern; begin to suspect the presence or existence of;detect out.
pine it, foresee, predict, conjecture it.
its accidents, its accessories; the things which are not essential to the main thing but serve instead to hide that important thing.
ticketed, distinguished with descriptions; carrying a label to distinguish it from others.
shipwreck, disaster.
appendicitis, inflammation of the vermiform appendix.
cheap Jacks. A cheap Jack is a dealer in low-priced goods, especially goods of an inferior or shoddy make; hence, a cheap, impertinent, or low-bred fellow.
atone, make reparation, compensation, or amends for a crime or an offense.
dynamos, mechanical devices for converting mechanical energy into electrical energy.
epigram, a bright or witty thought, tersely expressed.
“The people in their wisdom, ” the people in full possession of their wisdom; the people acting wisely.
pessimistic prophets, people who take the least hopeful view of the future.
inveterately, habitually.
world without end, eternally.
irremediable destiny, that which is in store for us in the future, and that which cannot be remedied, changed.
Uncle Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. The United States of America is referred to as Uncle Sam:according to a story which lacks proof, the name arose from the circumstance that the initials U. S. （United States） marked on certain casks of provisions at Troy, New York, purchased for the American army in the war of 1812, were facetiously interpreted as “Uncle Sam,” the nickname of Mr. Samuel Wilson, government inspector. The eagle is the emblem of the United States; hence in drawing the hog, a greedy, gluttonous and filthy animal, instead of the eagle to represent the United States, the suggestion of coarseness and absence of refinement is implied.
to the foretime, of the past.
vegetate, lead a passive existence without initiative or exertion of body or mind.
sufferance, tolerance; consent.
utopias. Utopia is an imaginary island, represented by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) in his book Utopia, as enjoying approximate perfection in politics, laws, etc.; hence, utopias are places or states of ideal perfection. Utopia itself means “no such place.”
fatalistically, in the manner of one who believes the doctrine that all things are subject to fate—that the appointed lot or allotted life of an inpidual is foredoomed or predetermined.
croaker, one who grumbles or complains unreasonably; one who habitually forebodes evil.
glow,from intense heat within;shine, by emiting or reflecting light.
brought round again, come back again.
anonymously, without a leader or a name.
initiatives, first steps; leads; things done by an inventor.
patterns, those which are to be, or are fit to be, copied or imitated.
rivalry, competing; vying; being rivals.
statable, can be stated.
ultra-simple, extremely simple; easily intelligible.
cue. The cue is the last word or words of a speech, or the ending of any action in a play, as indicating the time for the next person to speak or act. Taking their cue means succeeding in order of time, rank, sequence, etc.
bird's-eye view, the view that can be embraced at a glance, hence, a general view, not one that enters into minute details.
take our bearings, find out where we stand; show us where we are.
shifting, changing in form or character; changeable.
alumni are the male graduates of a college or other institution of learning;alumnæ are the female graduates.Alumnus and alumna are the corresponding singular forms.
noblesse oblige, nobility obliges, —often used to denote the obligation of the honorable and generous behavior associated with high rank or birth.
corporate, united, combined into one group; group.
class-consciousness, thoughts and feelings that belong to us as a class.
“Les intellectuels, ” applied ironically by the “red bloods” to Zola, Clemenceau and other intellectual leaders of France who stood up for Dreyfus.
ironically, expressing a sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts a mode of speech the intended implication of which is the opposite of the literal sense of the words, as when expressions of praise are used where blame is meant.
“red blood, ” the anti-Semitic and other strongly nationalistic groups in France which were in favor of keeping Dreyfus in Devil's Island （the French penal colony）, primarily because he is a Jew. These men brought the strongest pressure to bear on the officials to prevent them from reopening the case, especially in 1896.
anti-Dreyfus craze. Alfred Dreyfus （1859-1935）, a captain in the French army, of Jewish parentage, was accused of selling army secrets and convicted in 1894. In 1896 evidence was shown that Major Esterhazy was the traitor. The affair became a public issue. Only the decline of nationalism permitted the eventual reversal of the verdict in 1906. In the World War, Dreyfus rose to the rank of lieutenant general and was awarded the Legion of Honor. Zola, for his famous attack on the government “J'accuse,” was imprisoned. Clemenceau also fought for the condemned man.
satirize, bring ridicule; assail with satire.
judicious pilot, sensible and prudent guide through a difficult or unknown course.
tiller, a lever of wood or metal fitted to the rudder-head and used for turning the rudder of a ship from side to side.
distraught, crazed with grief; beset with doubt or mental conflict.
leeways, the lateral movements of a ship to the leeward of her course;the deviations from the course indicated by the line of her keel which she makes by drifting to leeward.
tack, to change the direction of a vessel when sailing closely-hauled, by putting the helm alee and shifting the sails so that she will come up into the wind and then fall off on the other side until she proceeds at about the same angle to the wind as before, but on the opposite tack—a tack on a vessel is the direction in which the vessel sails.
tug, a laborious pulling or straining; hence, a severe stress.
warp, pull ship by means of a rope; haul along by a rope.
yeast cake for democracy's dough. A yeast cake is a mealy or doughy cake impregnated with live germs of the yeast plant, used for raising bread. Dough refers to the soft mass of moistened flour or meal, kneaded or unkneaded, but not yet baked. Hence the clause means that we must be the uplifters, the persons to improve and move the mass of humanity.
double reefs, doubling over or together of those parts of a sail which are taken in or let out by means of the reef points, in order to regulate the size of the sail.
canvas, a sail or a collection of sails of a vessel; a coarse, heavy cloth of hemp or flax, spread to catch the wind by means of which a vessel is driven forward in the water.
Stevenson, Robert Louis （1850-1894）, Scottish essayist, romancer, and poet.
eradicate, root out; pluck up by the roots; destroy utterly.
Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U. S. A. America's foremost seat of learning, founded in 1636. William James was professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard.
sterilized conceit, personal vanity that has been rid of microbes even;conceit that is very particular and exclusive.
Edith Wyatt （1873-1958）, American author. Her home is in Chicago. Her Every One His Own Way was printed in 1901.
a couple, a wedded or engaged pair.
Richard Elliot, one of the main characters in Edith Wyatt's book.
feminine counterpart, wife.
caricatures, grotesque representations of persons by overemphasis on characteristics.
Cambridge and Boston, where Harvard University is located.
priggishness. A prig is a person who is narrowly or self-consciously engrossed in his own mental or spiritual attainments.
painter's colic, a paroxysmal pain in the abdomen, due to spasm, obstruction, or distention of some one of the hollow viscera.
trade disease, illness, sickness, or ailment pertaining to a particular trade.
pounces, swoops down and seizes.
human core. The core is the central part of anything; the essential part; hence, the heart or soul of the human being.
regnant, prevalent, predominant, ruling.
robuster, more vigorous.
gives it a wide berth, keeps far away from it.
“tone, ” prevailing character of morals, sentiments, etc., which gives a general effect of the whole.
reverts, turns back, goes back; returns.
spreading power, power of spreading and influencing others.
McClure's Magazine, etc., are all American magazines of a very popular nature and therefore not of the highest literary merit.
popular university, a place of higher learning for the mass of people. clarification, act or process of making clear.
“ten-cent magaines, ” popular magazines, commonly trashy or sensational, and sold for ten cents, so that all may buy them to read.
synthetic, formed by artificial synthesis—the art or process of making or “building up” a compound by a union of simpler compounds or of its elements.
groping, feeling our way as in the dark; proceeding tentatively.
Questions
1. From what point of view is Mr. James considering the value of college education?
2. What does he mean by the phrase “help you to know a good man when you see him”?
3. What contrast is usually made between colleges and business, technical, or professional schools? How far do such schools develop critical sense?
4. What is meant by the humanities? When is a study of humanity?
5. What should be gained from a study of the humanities?
6. Why is it important to recognize superiority?
7. Why is it important in a democracy that the people should know good men? What do critics of American democracy claim?
8. What are the sole factors active in human progress?
9. Explain the meaning of “The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world.”
10. How may the democratic problem be stated?
11. How does the value of the educated class then define itself?
12. In what way may the group of college graduates be compared with the autocracy in older countries?
13. How is the function of the college-bred in a democracy like that of the pilot on a ship?
14. By what does real culture live?
15. What is meant by “tone”?
16. How are certain magizines competing with the college-bred in indicating the better men?
17. In conclusion, what formula describes best the results at which colleges ought to aim?
参考译文
【作品简介】
《大学生的社会价值》，作者威廉·詹姆斯，载于《麦克卢尔杂志》第30卷，419页。后收入斯科特及泽特林编写的《大学英语散文选读》，纽约麦克米伦公司1920年出版，137—144页。
【作者简介】
威廉·詹姆斯（1842—1910），美国心理学家、哲学家。其弟为亨利·詹姆斯（1843—1916），小说家，散文家。1890年，威廉·詹姆斯发表划时代作品《心理学原理》时，其哲学思想之萌芽已清晰可辨。他独具特色的风格、广阔的文化视野和世界主义思想使其成为当时美国最具影响力的思想家。