ABSTRACT
The thoughts of men and women in America as elsewhere reach after everything under the sun and beyond it. And these thoughts are obviously too multitudinous and too elusive to be encompassed and chronicled by any one writer or group of writers. In the first place, what is distinctive about American thought reflects the differences between the men and women who came to America and those who stayed at home. The immigrants who came to America came as to a promised land free from the scourges of persecution and from the oppression of caste. That the prestige of purely intellectual work is still very low in the United States can hardly be doubted in the face of the comparatively slight social esteem in which those engaged in its pursuit is held. The character of the intellectual life of a country may be determined by the kind of leadership it enjoys.
