You may watch the process any evening
at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the
easy chair at home.
This philosophy of living which I have called American idealism
is in its own nature sound, as is proved in a hundred directions
where it has had full play. Suppressed idealism, like any other
suppressed desire, becomes unsound. And here lies the ultimate
cause of the taste for sentimentalism in the American _bourgeoisie._
An undue insistence upon happy endings, regardless of the premises of
the story, and a craving for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure
signs of a "morbid complex," and to be compared with some justice to
the craving for drugs in an alcoholic deprived of liquor. No one can
doubt the effect of the suppression by the Puritan discipline of that
instinctive love of pleasure and liberal experience common to us all.
Its unhealthy reaction is visible in every old American community. No
one who faces the facts can deny the result of the suppression by
commercial, bourgeois, prosperous America of our native idealism.
The student of society may find its dire effects in politics, in
religion, and in social intercourse.
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