from My Commonplace Book (moral illusionism)

I am touching on the central weakness of the Anglo-American mind—its moral illusionism. That mind is generally quite sincere. It really arranges its own impulses and the impulses of other men in a rigid hierarchy of fixed norms. It has surrendered the right and the power of examining the contents of such concepts as “right,” “wrong,” “pure,” “democracy,” “liberty,” “progress,” or of bringing these conventionalized gestures of the mind to the test of experience. It has not, indeed, ever naively experienced anything. . . . It hides the edges of the sea of life with a board-walk of ethical concepts and sits there, hoping that no will hear the thunder of the surf of human passions on the rocks below.

—Ludwig Lewisohn, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (1922)