America has its own cultural traditions and achievements. It is the crucial mistake of many interpretations in the fields of intellectual history to reduce American philosophy or scholarly disciplines to mere continuations of European approaches. Whenever the classical philosophers of American pragmatism were not attacked by their German contemporaries as being the "typical product of a country in which the people are degraded to the status of slaves of materialism, of industry, i.e. of dollars' (Gutberiet [1908], p. 445), their thinking was simply traced back to European sources.