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Article: THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA.(Review)
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- June 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA By Louis Menand. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
After Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., died in 1935--three years after his retirement from the Supreme Court and two days short of his ninety-fourth birthday--two of his Union army uniforms were found in his closet. Pinned to them was a note that read, "These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood." Holmes's experience of the world's first modern war not only stained his clothes; it also turned him against abstract idealisms of the sort that he believed had caused his father's generation to endorse a fanatical abolitionism. ...