catenation as belonging to the great age of English classicism, and, specifically, to Burke:
It is, therefore, our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigor and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth, so to be patriots that we are gentlemen. To cultivate friendships, and to incur enmities. To have both strong, but both selected; in the one to be placable; in the other immovable. To model our principles to our duties and our situation. To be fully persuaded, that all virtue which is impracticable is spurious; and rather to run the risk of falling into faults in a course which leads us to act with effect and energy, than to loiter out our days without blame and without use.
The following description of the perfected intellect is obviously not-American. No American conceives of a perfected intellect as the object or as "the result" of education. No American expresses such experienced delight in the things of the mind. It is un-American to attempt to see things steadily and to see them whole. It is not in the American mode to present in a single sentence a conspectus of an elaborate analytical process. These are the marks of a mind which has been effectively to school under Socrates—they are the marks of Newman:
