New Patterns of Thought
I. Disintegration and Reintegration: Two forces creating a new ideology, science and the machine. The decay of the older theological, political mind, and the emergence of an urban mind 189
I. The Victorian Mood--A genial optimism 193
1. Sociology and the Enlightenment: Condorcet, Comte, and the gospel of progress 194
2. Biology and the Enlightenment: Spencer and the philosophy of anarchism 197
3. The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment 202
II. The School of Spencer--John Fiske 203
II. The Skepticism of the House of Adams: The flower of the sturdy New England character. They fail to adjust to the Gilded Age 212
I. Charles Francis Adams--The Business Failure 213
II. Henry Adams--Intellectual 214
III. Brooks Adams--Rebel 227
III. Victorian Realism: In the eighties realism begins to excite interest and the movement gets under way, though the American taste is still romantic. The psychology of the dispersion marking America 237
I. [William James and Pragmatism]
II. Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture 239
III. William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace 241
Book Two: The Old and the New: Storm Clouds