The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy a famous/infamous work by George Santayana. a link: courtesy of Columbia University library. I won't argue with GS in this entry, I'll simply present his complaint against the tradition in question. This complaint was that three very conflicting strands made up this philosophy, which exists by fudging the differences among those strands. The "genteel tradition" in the US in the late 19th century consisted of one part Calvinist Christianity, one part Darwinian evolution, and one part Hegelian idealism. Darwin was taken as having provided empirical support for the dialectical progression to which Hegel gave world-constituting significance, and both were taken to vindicate the Reformation. The churches in the U.S.in Emerson's day, Santayana says, had left any rigorous adherence to Calvinism behind, but they had nothing else on offer philosophically except "a selection or a new emphasis on parts of what Calv...