They belong to the nature of the craft.

Those forms and standards were never sufficiently naturalized in America during the Colonial Period, because the economic and social conditions of the time did not justify such naturalization.

The appropriate occasion for the transfer was postponed until after American political independence had been secured; and when occasion did not arise, the naturalness of the transfer was perverted and obscured by political preconceptions.
The foregoing considerations throw a new light upon the mistake made by the American heretics of the Middle Period.

In so far as their assertion of American intellectual independence was negative, it should not have been a protest against "feudalism," social classification, social and individual discipline, approved technical methods, or any of those social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely believed to be exclusively European.

It should have been a protest against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism--the Americanism of national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism.