As for philosophy, it is not merely such men as Maritain and Wust and Streeter and Hocking who are in revolt against mechano-morphism. The thing is clean gone out of fashion, except in American undergraduate colleges. It will hardly do, in the face of the facts, to explain collegiate indifference to religion on the ground of intellectual necessity. It is not modern thought that is to blame. Nor is it, perhaps, the individual undergraduate who is altogether at fault.
Youth is always conformist, more so than childhood or middle age.
The undergraduate hates to be eccentric, or even to seem so. Half of the problems of college education are conditioned by this undergraduate prejudice against originality or independence of thought. The college student therefore reflects, quite naturally and understandably, the current notion that only those things are important which advance worldly position. Our generation ignores religion as far as possible, because to do so enables men and women to avoid interference with impulses engendered by cupidity. Contemporary civilization is largely built upon the basic idea that the world may become any man's oyster.