 Preface of Democracy in America, Volume 2. Democracy in America, Volume 2. By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by Henry Reeve. Book 2. Influence of Democracy on Progress of Opinion in the United States. De Tocqueville's Preface to the Second Part. The Americans live in a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested them certain laws and a certain political character. This same state of society has, moreover, engendered amongst them a multitude of feelings and opinions which were unknown amongst the elder aristocratic communities of Europe. It has destroyed or modified all the relations which before existed and established others of a novel kind. The aspect of civil society has been no less affected by these changes than that of the political world. The former subject has been treated of in the work on the Democracy of America, which I published five years ago. To examine the latter is the object of the present book, but these two parts complete each other and form one and the same work. I must at once warn the reader against an error which would be extremely prejudicial to me. When he finds that I attribute so many different consequences to the principle of equality, he may thence infer that I consider that principle to be the sole cause of all that takes place in the present age, but this would be to impute to me a very narrow view. A multitude of opinions, feelings, and propensities are now in existence, which show their origin to circumstances unconnected with, or even contrary to, the principle of equality. Thus, if I were to select the United States as an example, I could easily prove that the nature of the country, the origin of its inhabitants, the religion of its founders, their acquired knowledge, and their former habits have exercised, and still exercise independently of democracy, a vast influence upon the thoughts and feelings of that people. Different causes, but no less distinct from the circumstance of the equality of conditions, might be traced in Europe, and would explain a great portion of the occurrences taking place amongst us. I acknowledge the existence of all these different causes and their power, but my subject does not lead me to treat of them. I have not undertaken to unfold the reason of all our inclinations and all our notions. My only object is to show in what respects the principle of equality has modified both the former and the latter. Some readers may perhaps be astonished that, firmly persuaded as I am that the democratic revolution which we are witnessing is an irresistible fact against which it would be neither desirable nor wise to struggle, I should often have had occasion in this book to address language of such severity to those democratic communities which this revolution has brought into being. My answer is simply that it is because I am not an adversary of democracy that I have sought to speak of democracy in all sincerity. Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends. For this reason I have spoken it. I was persuaded that many would take upon themselves to announce the new blessings which the principle of equality promises to mankind, but few would dare to point out from afar the dangers with which it threatens them. To these perils therefore I have turned my chief attention, and believing that I had discovered them clearly, I have not had the cowardice to leave them untold. I trust that my readers will find in this second part that impartiality which seems to have been remarked in the former work. Placed as I am in the midst of the conflicting opinions between which we are divided, endeavor to suppress within me for a time the favorable sympathies or the adverse emotions with which each of them inspires me. If those who read this book can find a single sentence intended to flatter any of the great parties which have agitated my country, or any of those petty factions which now harass and weaken it, let such readers raise their voices to accuse me. The subject I have sought to embrace is immense, for it includes the greater part of the feelings and opinions to which the new state of society has given birth. Such a subject is doubtless above my strength, and in treating it I have not succeeded in satisfying myself. But if I have not been able to reach the goal which I had in view, my readers will at least do me the justice to acknowledge that I have conceived and followed up my undertaking in a spirit not unworthy of success. Alexis de Tocqueville, March 1840. End of Preface Part 1, Chapters 1 and 2 of Democracy in America, Volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leon Meyer. Democracy in America, Volume 2. By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by Henry Reeve. Part 1. Influence of Democracy on the Action of Intellect in the United States. Chapter 1. Philosophical Method among the Americans. I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them. Nevertheless, it is easy to perceive that almost all the inhabitants of the United States conduct their understanding in the same manner, and govern it by the same rules. That is to say that without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical method, they are in possession of one, common to the whole people. To evade the bondage of system and habit of family maxims, class opinions, and in some degree of national prejudices, to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise, and doing better, to seek the reason of things for oneself and in oneself alone, to tend to results without being bound to means, and to aim at the substance through the form, such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans. But if I go further, and if I seek amongst these characteristics, that which predominates over and includes almost all the rest, I discover that, in most of the operations of the mind, each American appeals to the individual exercise of his own understanding alone. America is therefore one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied, and where the precepts of Descartes are best applied. Nor is this surprising. The Americans do not read the works of Descartes because their social condition deters them from speculative studies. But they follow his maxims because this very social condition naturally disposes their understanding to adopt them. In the midst of the continual movement, which agitates a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken. Every man readily loses the trace of the ideas of his forefathers, or takes no care about them. Nor can men living in this state of society derive their belief from the opinions of the class to which they belong. For, so to speak, there are no longer any classes. Or those which still exist are composed of such mobile elements that their body can never exercise a real control over its members. As to the influence which the intelligence of one man has on that of another, it must necessarily be very limited in a country where the citizens, placed on the footing of a general similitude, are all closely seen by each other, and where, as no signs of incontestable greatness or superiority are perceived in any one of them, they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is then destroyed, but the taste for trusting the ipsy dixit of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up in his own breast and affects from that point to judge the world. The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving, without assistance, all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend, which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and in almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural. As it is on their own testimony that they are accustomed to rely, they like to discern the object which engages their attention with extreme clearness. They therefore strip off as much as possible all that covers it. They rid themselves of whatever separates them from it. They remove whatever conceals it from sight, in order to view it more closely and in the broad day of light. This disposition of the mind soon leads them to contend forms, which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth. The Americans, then, have not required to extract their philosophical method from books, they have found it in themselves. The same thing may be remarked in what has taken place in Europe. This same method has only been established and made popular in Europe in proportion as the condition of society has become more equal, and men have grown more like each other. Let us consider for a moment the connection of the periods in which this change may be traced. In the sixteenth century the Reformers subjected some of the dogmas of the ancient faith to the scrutiny of private judgment, but they still withheld from it the judgment of all the rest. In the seventeenth century, Bacon in the natural sciences and Descartes in the study of philosophy in the strict sense of the term abolished recognized formulas, destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the schools. The philosophers of the eighteenth century, generalizing at length the same principle, undertook to submit to the private judgment of each man all the objects of his belief. Who does not perceive that Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire employed the same method, and that they differed only in the greater or less use which they professed should be made of it? Why did the Reformers confine themselves so closely within the circle of religious ideas? Why did Descartes, choosing only to apply his method to certain matters, though he had made it fit to be applied to all, declare that men might judge for themselves in matters philosophical, but not in matters political? How happened it that in the eighteenth century those general applications were all at once drawn from this same method which Descartes and his predecessors had either not perceived or had rejected? To what, lastly, is the fact to be attributed that at this period the method we are speaking of suddenly emerged from the schools to penetrate into society and become the common standard of intelligence, and that after it had become popular among the French it has been ostensibly adopted or secretly followed by all the nations of Europe? The philosophical method here designated may have been engendered in the sixteenth century. It may have been more accurately defined and more extensively applied in the seventeenth, but neither in one or in the other could it be commonly adopted. Political laws, the condition of society, and the habits of mind which are derived from these causes were as yet opposed to it. It was discovered at a time when men were beginning to equalize and assimilate their conditions. It could only be generally followed in ages when these conditions had at length become nearly equal, and men nearly alike. The philosophical method of the eighteenth century is then not only French, but it is democratic, and this explains why it was so readily admitted throughout Europe where it has contributed so powerfully to change the face of society. It is not because the French have changed their former opinions and altered their former manners that they have convulsed the world, but because they were the first to generalize and bring to light a philosophical method by the assistance of which it became easy to attack all that was old, and to open a path to all that was new. If it be asked why at the present day this same method is more rigorously followed and more frequently applied by the French than by the Americans, although the principle of equality be no less complete and of more ancient date amongst the latter people, the fact may be attributed to two circumstances, which it is essential to have clearly understood in the first instance. It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society. In the United States, religion is therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all the feelings of patriotism, whence it derives a peculiar force. To this powerful reason, another of no less intensity may be added. In America, religion has, as it were, laid down its own limits. Religious institutions have remained wholly distinct from political institutions, so that former laws have been easily changed whilst former belief has remained unshaken. Christianity has therefore retained a stronghold on the public mind in America, and I would more particularly remark that its way is not only that of a philosophical doctrine which has been adopted upon inquiry, but of a religion which is believed without discussion. In the United States, Christian sex are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified, but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it. The Americans, having admitted the principal doctrines of the Christian religion without inquiry, are obliged to accept in like manner a great number of moral truths originating in it and connected with it. Hence the activity of individual analysis is restrained within narrow limits, and many of the most important of human opinions are removed from the range of its influence. The second circumstance to which I have alluded is the following. The social condition and the constitution of the Americans are democratic, but they have not had a democratic revolution. They arrived upon the soil they occupy in nearly the condition in which we see them at the present day, and this is of very considerable importance. There are no revolutions which do not shake existing belief, innovate authority, and throw doubts over commonly received ideas. The effect of all revolutions is therefore more or less to surrender men to their own guidance and to open to the mind of every man avoid an almost unlimited range of speculation. When equality of conditions succeeds a protracted conflict between the different classes of which the elder society was composed, envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, pride, and exaggerated self-confidence are apt to seize upon the human heart and plant their sway there for a time. This, independently of equality itself, tins powerfully to divide men, to lead them to mistrust the judgment of others, and to seek the light of truth nowhere but in their own understandings. Everyone then attempts to be his own sufficient guide, and makes it his boast to form his own opinions on all subjects. Men are no longer bound together by ideas, but by interests, and seem as if human opinions were reduced to a sort of intellectual dust scattered on every side, unable to collect, unable to cohere. Thus that independence of mind which equality supposes to exist is never so great nor ever appear so excessive as at the time when equality is beginning to establish itself, and in the course of that painful labor by which it is established. That sort of intellectual freedom which equality may give ought therefore to be very carefully distinguished from the anarchy which revolution brings. Each of these two things must be severally considered in order not to conceive exaggerated hopes or fears of the future. I believe that the men who will live under the new forms of society will make frequent use of their private judgment, but I am far from thinking that they will often abuse it. This is attributable to a cause of more general application to all democratic countries, and which in the long run must needs restrain in them the independence of individual speculation within fixed and sometimes narrow limits. I shall proceed to point out this cause in the next chapter. Chapter 2 Of the Principal Source of Belief Among Democratic Nations At different periods dogmatical belief is more or less abundant. It arises in different ways and it may change its object or its form, but under no circumstances will dogmatical belief cease to exist, or in other words men will never cease to entertain some implicit opinions without trying them by actual discussion. If everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone, it is not to be supposed that any considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief. But obviously without such common belief no society can prosper, say rather no society can subsist, for without ideas held in common there is no common action, and without common action there may still be men, but there is no social body. In order that society should exist and a fortiori that a society should prosper, it is required that all the minds of the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas, unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the common source, and consents to accept certain matters of belief at the hands of the community. If I now consider man in his isolated capacity, I find that dogmatical belief is not less indispensable to him in order to live alone, is not less indispensable to him in order to live alone, than it is to enable him to cooperate with his fellow creatures. If man were forced to demonstrate to himself all the truths of which he makes daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory exercises without advancing beyond them. As from the shortness of his life he has not the time, nor from the limits of his intelligence the capacity to accomplish this. He is reduced to take upon trust a number of facts and opinions which he has not had either the time or the power to verify himself, but which men of greater ability have sought out or which the world adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own thoughts, nor has he led to proceed in this manner by choice so much as he is constrained by the inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher of such great parts in the world but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. This is not only necessary but desirable. A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief and he must adopt many opinions without discussion in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another does so far enslave his mind but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom. A principle of authority must then always occur under all circumstances in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable but a place it necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be greater or it may be less. Unbounded it cannot be. Thus the question is not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured. I have shown in the preceding chapter how the equality of conditions leads men to entertain a sort of instinctive incredulity of the supernatural and a very lofty and often exaggerated opinion of the human understanding. The men who live at a period of social equality are not therefore easily led to place that intellectual authority to which they bow either beyond or above humanity. They commonly seek for the sources of truth in themselves or in those who are like themselves. This would be enough to prove that at such periods no new religion could be established and that all schemes for such a purpose would be not only in pious but absurd and irrational. It may be foreseen that a democratic people will not easily give credence to divine missions that they will turn modern prophets to a ready jest and that they will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their belief within and not beyond the limits of their kind. When the ranks of society are unequal and men unlike each other in condition there are some individuals invested with all the power of superior intelligence learning and enlightenment whilst the multitude is sunk in ignorance and prejudice. Men living at these aristocratic periods are therefore naturally induced to shape their opinions by the superior standard of a person or a class of persons whilst they are averse to recognize the infallibility of the mass of the people. The contrary takes place in ages of equality. The nearer the citizens are drawn to the common level of an equal and similar condition the less prone does each man become to place implicit faith in a certain man or a certain class of men. But his readiness to believe the multitude increases and opinion is more than ever mistress of the world. Not only is common opinion the only guide which private judgment retains amongst a democratic people but amongst such a people it possesses a power infinitely beyond what it has elsewhere. At periods of equality men have no faith in one another by reason of their common resemblance but this very resemblance is almost unbounded confidence in the judgment of the public for it would not seem probable as they are all endowed with equal means of judging but that the greater truth should go with the greater number. When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast to so huge a body he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality which renders him independent of each of his fellow citizens taken severally exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number. The public has therefore among a democratic people a singular power of which aristocratic nations could never so much as conceive an idea for it does not persuade them to certain opinions but it enforces them and infuses them into the faculties by a sort of enormous pressure of the minds of all upon the reason of each. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready made opinions for the use of individuals who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories on philosophy moral and politics without inquiry upon public trust and if we look to it very narrowly it will be perceived that religion herself holds her sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion. The fact that the political laws of the Americans are such that the majority rules the community with sovereign sway materially increases the power which that majority naturally exercises over the mind for nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor. This political omnipotence of the majority in the United States doubtless augments the influence which public opinion would obtain without it over the mind of each member of the community. But the foundations of that influence do not rest upon it. They must be sought for in the principle of equality itself not in the more or less popular institutions which men living under that condition may give themselves. The intellectual dominion of the greater number would probably be less absolute amongst the democratic people governed by a king than in the sphere of a pure democracy but it will always be extremely absolute. And by whatever political laws men are governed in the ages of equality it may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become a species of religion there in the majority it's ministering profit. Thus intellectual authority will be different but it will not be diminished and far from thinking that it will disappear I augur that it may readily acquire too much preponderance and confine the action of private judgment within narrower limits than are suited either to the greatness or the happiness of the human race. In the principle of equality I very clearly discerned two tendencies the one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts the other inclined to prohibit him from thinking at all and I perceive how under the dominion of certain laws democracy would extinguish that liberty of the mind to which a democratic social condition is favourable so that after having broken all the bondage once imposed on it by ranks or by men the human mind would be closely fettered to the general will of the greatest number. If the absolute power of the majority were to be substituted by democratic nations and different powers which checked or retarded over much the energy of individual minds the evil would only have changed its symptoms men would not have found the means of independent life they would simply have invented no easy task a new dress for servitude there is and I cannot repeat it too often there is in this matter for profound reflection for those who look on freedom as a holy thing and who hate not only the despot but despotism for myself when I feel the hand of power light heavy on my brow I care but little to know who oppresses me and I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million of men end of part one chapters one and two part one chapters three and four of democracy in America volume two this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Leon Meyer democracy in America volume two by Alexis de Tocqueville translated by Henry Reeve part one chapter three why the Americans display more readiness and more taste for general ideas than their forefathers the English the deity does not regard the human race collectively he surveys at one glance and severly all the beings of whom mankind is composed and he discerns in each man the resemblances which assimilate him to all his fellows and the differences which distinguish him from them God therefore stands in no need of general ideas that is to say he is never sensible of the necessity of selecting a considerable number of analogous objects under the same form for greater convenience and thinking such is however not the case with man if the human mind were to attempt to examine and pass a judgment on all the individual cases before it the immensity of detail would soon lead a distrae and bewilder its discernment in this straight man has recourse to an imperfect but necessary expedient which at once assists and demonstrates his weakness having superficially considered a certain number of objects and remarked the resemblance he assigns to them a common name sets them apart and proceeds onwards general ideas are no proof of the strength but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect for there are in nature no beings exactly alike no things precisely identical nor any rules indiscriminately of objects at once the chief merit of general ideas is that they enable the human mind to pass a rapid judgment on a great many objects at once but on the other hand the notions they convey are never otherwise than incomplete and they always cause the mind to lose as much inaccuracy as it gains incomprehensiveness as social bodies advance in civilization they acquire the knowledge of new facts and they daily lay hold almost unconsciously of some particular truths the more truths of this kind a man apprehends the more general ideas is he naturally led to conceive a multitude of particular facts cannot be seen separately without at last discovering the common tie which connects them several individuals lead to the perception of the species several species to that of the genus hence the habit and the taste for general ideas will always be greatest amongst the people of ancient civilization and extensive knowledge but there are other reasons which impel men to generalize their ideas or which restrain them from it the Americans are much more addicted to the use of general ideas than the English and entertain a much greater relish for them this appears very singular at first sight when it is remembered that the two nations have the same origin that they lived for centuries under the same laws and that they still incessantly interchange their opinions and their manners this contrast becomes much more striking still if we fix our eyes on our own part of the world and compare together the two most enlightened nations which inhabit it it would seem as if the mind of the English could only tear itself reluctantly and painfully away from the observation of particular facts to rise from them to their causes and that it only generalizes in spite of itself amongst the French on the contrary the taste for general ideas would seem to have grown to so ardent to passion that it must be satisfied on every occasion I am informed every morning when I wake that some general and eternal law has just been discovered which I never heard mentioned before there is not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at discovering truths applicable to a great kingdom and who is very ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in compressing the human race into the compass of an article so great a dissimilarity between two very enlightened nations surprises me if I again turn my attention to England and observe the events which have occurred there in the last half century I think I may affirm that a taste for the general ideas increases in that country in proportion as its ancient constitution is weakened the state of civilization is therefore insufficient by itself to explain what suggests to the human mind the love of general ideas or diverts it from them when the conditions of men are very unequal and inequality itself is the permanent state of society individual men gradually become so dissimilar that each class assumes the aspect of a distinct race only one of these classes is ever in view at the same instant and losing sight of that general tie which binds them all within the vast bosom of mankind the observation invariably rests not on man but on certain men those who live in this aristocratic state of society never therefore can see very general ideas respecting themselves and that is enough to imbue them with an habitual distrust of such ideas and an instinctive aversion of them he on the contrary who inhabits a democratic country sees around him on every hand men differing but little from each other he cannot turn his mind to any one portion of mankind without expanding and dilating his thought till it embrace the whole all the truths which are applicable to himself appear to him equally and similarly applicable to each of his fellow citizens and fellow men having contracted the habit of generalizing his ideas in the study which engages him most and interests him more than others he transfers the same habit to all his pursuits and thus it is that the craving to discover general laws and everything to include a great number of objects under the same formula and to explain a mass of facts by a single cause becomes an ardent and sometimes an undisserting passion in the human mind nothing shows the truth of this proposition more clearly than the opinions of the ancients respecting their slaves the most profound and capacious minds of Rome and Greece were never able to reach the idea at once so general and so simple of the common likeness of men and of the common birthright of each to freedom they strove to prove that slavery was in the order of nature and that it would always exist nay, more everything shows us that those of the ancients who had passed from the servile to the free condition of the writings did themselves regard servitude in no other light all the great writers of antiquity belong to the aristocracy of masters or at least they saw that aristocracy established and uncontested before their eyes their mind after it had expanded itself in several directions was barred from further progress in this one and the advent of Jesus Christ upon earth was required to teach that all the members of the human race are by nature equal and alike in the ages of equality all men are independent of each other isolated and weak the movements of the multitude are not permanently guided by the will of any individuals at such times humanity seems always to advance of itself in order therefore to explain what is passing in the world man is driven to seek for some great causes which acting in the same manner on all our fellow creatures thus impel them all involuntarily to pursue the same track this again naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas and super induces a taste for them I have already shown in what way the equality of conditions leads every man to investigate truths for himself it may readily be perceived that a method of this kind must insensibly beget a tendency to general ideas in the human mind when I repudiate the traditions of rank profession and birth when I escape from the authority of example to seek out by the single effort of my reason the path to be followed I am inclined to derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself which leads me necessarily and almost unconsciously to adopt a great number of very general notions all that I have here said explains the reasons for which the English display much less readiness and taste for the generalization of ideas than their American progeny and still less again than their French neighbors and likewise the reason for which the English of the present day display more of these qualities than their forefathers did the English have long been a very enlightened and very aristocratic nation their enlightened conditioned urged them constantly to generalize and their aristocratic habits can find them to particularize hence arose that philosophy at once bold and timid broad and narrow which has hitherto prevailed in England and which still obstructs and stagnates in so many minds in that country independently of the causes I have pointed out in what goes before others may be discerned less apparent but no less efficacious which engender amongst almost every democratic people a taste and frequently a passion for general ideas an accurate distinction must be taken between ideas of this kind some are the result of slow minute and conscientious labor of the mind and these extend the sphere of human knowledge others spring up at once from the first rapid exercise of the wits and beget none but very superficial and very uncertain notions men who live in ages of equality have a great deal of curiosity and very little leisure their life is so practical so confused so excited so active that but little time remains to them for thought such men are prone to general ideas because they spare them the trouble of studying particulars they contain if I may so speak a great deal in a little compass and give in a little time a great return if then upon a brief and inattentive investigation a common relation is thought to be detected between certain objects inquiry not pushed any further and without examining in detail how far these different objects differ or agree they are hastily arranged under one formulary in order to pass to another subject one of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste all men have at such ties for easy success and present enjoyment this occurs in the pursuits of the intellect as well as in all others most of those who live at a time of equality are full of an ambition at once aspiring and relaxed they would feign succeed brilliantly and at once but they would be dispensed from great efforts to obtain success these conflicting tendencies lead straight to the research of general ideas by aid of which they flatter themselves that they configure very importantly at a small expense and draw the attention of the public with very little trouble and I know not whether they be wrong in thinking thus for their readers are as much a verse to investigating anything to the bottom as they can be themselves and what is generally sought in the productions of the mind is easy pleasure and information without labor if aristocratic nations do not make sufficient use of general ideas and frequently treat them with inconsiderate disdain it is true on the other hand that a democratic people is ever ready to carry ideas of their own kind to excess and to espouse them with injudicious warmth Chapter 4 Why the Americans have never been so eager as the French for general ideas and political matters I observed in the last chapter that the Americans show a less decided taste for general ideas than the French this is more especially true in political matters although the Americans infuse into their legislation infinitely more general ideas than the English and although they pay much more attention than the latter people to the adjustment of the practice of affairs to theory no political bodies in the United States have ever shown so warm an attachment to general ideas as the constituent assembly in the convention in France at no time has the American people laid hold on ideas of this kind with the passionate energy of the French people in the 18th century or made the same blind confidence in the value and absolute truth of any theory this difference between the Americans and the French originates in several causes but principally in the following one the Americans form a democratic people which has always itself directed public affairs the French are a democratic people who for a long time could only speculate on the best manner of conducting them the social condition of France to conceive very general ideas on the subject of government whilst its political constitution prevented it from correcting those ideas by experiment and from gradually detecting their insufficiency whereas in America the two things constantly balance and correct each other it may seem at first sight that this is very much opposed to what I have said before that democratic nations derive their love of theory from the excitement of their active life a more attentive examination will show that there is nothing contradictory in the proposition men living in democratic countries eagerly lay hold of general ideas because they have but little leisure and because these ideas spare them the trouble of studying particulars this is true but it is only to be understood to apply to those matters which are not the necessary and habitual subjects of their thoughts mercantile men will take up very eagerly and without any very close scrutiny all the general ideas on philosophy, politics, science or the arts which may be presented to them but for such as relate to commerce they will not receive them without inquiry or adopt them without reserve the same thing applies to statesmen with regard to general ideas and politics if then there be a subject upon which a democratic people is peculiarly liable to abandon itself blindly and extravagantly to general ideas the best corrective that can be used will be to make that subject a part of the daily practical occupation of that people the people will then be compelled to enter upon its details and the details will teach them the weak points of the theory this remedy may frequently be a painful one but its effect is certain thus it happens that the democratic institutions now every citizen to take a practical part in the government moderate that excessive taste for general theories and politics which the principle of equality suggests end of part 1 chapters 3 and 4 democracy in america vol. 2 by alexis the dogfee translated by henry reeve part 1 chapter 5 of the manner in which religion in the united states avails itself of democratic tendencies i have laid it down in a preceding chapter that man cannot do without dogmatical belief and even that it is very much to be desired that such belief should exist amongst them i now ad that of all the kinds of dogmatical believe the most desirable appears to me to be dogmatical belief in matters of religion, and this is a very clear inference, even from no higher consideration than the interests of this world. There is hardly any human action, however particular a character be assigned to it, which does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow creatures. Nor can anything prevent these ideas from being the common spring from which everything else emanates. Men are therefore immeasurably interested in acquiring fixed ideas of God, of the soul, and of their common duties to their creator and to their fellow men. For doubt on these first principles would abandon all their actions to the impulse of chance, and would condemn them to live, to a certain extent, powerless and undisciplined. This is then the subject on which it is most important for each of us to entertain fixed ideas, and unhappily it is also the subject on which it is most difficult for each of us, left himself, to settle his opinions by the sole force of his reason. None but minds singularly free from the ordinary anxieties of life, minds at once penetrating, subtle and trained by thinking, can even with the assistance of much time and care, sound the depth of these most necessary truths. And indeed we see that these philosophers are themselves almost always and shrouded in uncertainties, that at every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure, and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions on which the mind of men has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firm grasp on truth or finding novelty even in its errors. Studies of this nature are far above the average capacity of men, and even if the majority of mankind were capable of such pursuits, it is evident that the leisure to cultivate them would still be wanting. Fixed ideas of God and human nature are indispensable to the daily practice of men's lives, but the practice of their lives prevents them from acquiring such ideas. The difficulty appears to me to be without a parallel. Amongst the sciences there are some which are useful to the mass of mankind, and which are within its reach. Others can only be approached by the few and are not cultivated by the many, who require nothing beyond their more remote applications. But the daily practice of the science I speak of is indispensable to all, although the study of it is inaccessible to the far greater number. Several ideas respecting God and human nature are therefore the ideas above all others which it is most suitable to withdraw from the habitual action of private judgment, and in which there is most to gain and least to lose by recognizing a principle of authority. The first object and one of the principal advantages of religions is to furnish to each of these fundamental questions a solution which is at once clear, precise, intelligible to the mass of mankind, and lasting. There are religions which are very false and very absurd, but it may be affirmed that any religion which remains within the circle I've just traced, without aspiring to go beyond it, as many religions have attempted to do for the purpose of enclosing on every side the free progress of the human mind, imposes a solitary restraint on the intellect, and it must be admitted that if it do not save man in another world, such religion is at least very conducive to their happiness and their greatness in this. This is more especially true of man living in free countries. When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold to the highest proportions of the intellect, and half paralyzes all the rest of its powers. Every man accustoms himself to entertain none but confused and changing notions on the subject most interesting to his fellow creatures and himself. His opinions are ill-defended and easily abandoned, and despairing of ever resolving by himself the hardest problems of the destiny of man, he ignobally submits to think no more about them. Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. Nor does it only happen in such a case that they allow their freedom to be wrested from them. They frequently themselves surrender it. When there is no longer any principle of authority and religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. The constant agitation of all surrounding things alarms and exhausts them. As everything is at sea in the sphere of the intellect, they determine at least that the mechanism of society should be firm and fixed, and as they cannot resume their ancient belief, they assume a master. For my own part I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire public freedom, and I am inclined to think that if faith be wanting in him he must serve, and if he be free he must believe. Perhaps, however, this great utility of religions is still more obvious amongst nations where equality of conditions prevails than amongst others. It must be acknowledged that equality which brings great benefits into the world nevertheless suggests to man, as will be shown hereafter, some very dangerous propensities. It tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man's attention upon himself, and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification. The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire diametrically contrary principles. There is no religion which does not place the object of man's desires above and beyond the treasures of earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul to regions far above those of the senses. Nor is there any which does not impose on man some sort of duties to his kind, and thus draws him at times from the contemplation of himself. This occurs in religions the most false and dangerous. Religious nations are therefore naturally strong on the very point on which democratic nations are weak, which shows of what importance it is for men to preserve their religion as their conditions become more equal. I have neither the right nor the intention of examining the supernatural means which God employs to infuse religious belief into the heart of man. I am at this moment considering religions in a purely human point of view. My object is to inquire by what means they may most easily retain their sway in the democratic ages upon which we are entering. It has been shown that at times of general cultivation and equality the human mind does not consent to adopt dogmatical opinions without reluctance and feels their necessity acutely in spiritual matters only. This proves in the first place that at such times religions ought more cautiously than at any other to confine themselves within their own precincts. For in seeking to extend their power beyond religious matters they incur a risk of not being believed at all. The circle within which they seek to bound the human intellect ought therefore to be carefully traced, and beyond its verge the mind should be left in entire freedom to its own guidance. Muhammad professed to derive from heaven, and he has inserted in the Quran not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The Gospel on the contrary only speaks for the general relations of man to God and to each other, beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone besides a thousand other reasons would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, while the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods. But in continuation of this branch of the subject, I find that in order for religions to maintain their authority, humanly speaking, in democratic ages, they must not only confine themselves strictly within the circle of spiritual matters. Their power also depends very much on the nature of the belief they inculcate, on the external forms they assume, and on the obligations they impose. The preceding observation that equality leads man to very general and very extensive notions is principally to be understood as applied to the question of religion. Men living in a similar and equal condition in the world readily conceive the idea of the one God governing every man by the same laws and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator, whilst on the contrary, in a state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven. It cannot be denied that Christianity itself has felt, to a certain extent, the influence which social and political conditions exercise on religious opinions. At the epoch at which the Christian religion appeared upon earth, providence by whom the world was doubtless prepared for its coming had gathered a large portion of the human race like an immense flock under the scepter of the Caesar's. The men of whom this multitude was composed were distinguished by numerous differences, but they had thus much in common that they all obeyed the same laws and that every subject was so weak and insignificant in relation to the imperial potentate that all appeared equal when their condition was contrasted with his. This novel and peculiar state of mankind necessarily predisposed men to listen to the general truth which Christianity teaches and may serve to explain the facility and rapidity with which they then penetrated into the human mind. The counterpart of this state of things was exhibited after the destruction of the empire, the Roman world being then as it were shattered into a thousand fragments, each nation resumed its pristine individuality. An infinite scale of ranks very soon grew up in the bosom of these nations. The different races were more sharply defined and each nation was divided by castes into several peoples. In the midst of this common effort which seemed to be urging human society to the greatest conceivable amount of voluntary subdivision, Christianity did not lose sight of the leading general ideas which it had brought into the world, but it appeared nevertheless to lend itself as much as was possible to those new tendencies to which the fractional distribution of mankind had given birth. Man continued to worship an only God, the creator and preserver of all things, but every people, every city and so to speak every man thought to obtain some distinct privilege and win the favor of an especial patron at the foot of the throne of grace. Unable to subdivide the deity, they multiplied and improperly enhanced the importance of the divine agents. Now how much due to saints and angels became an almost idolatrous worship amongst the majority of the Christian world? And apprehensions might be entertained for a moment lest the religion of Christ should retrograde towards the superstitions which it had subdued. It seems evident that the more the barriers are removed which separate nation from nation amongst mankind and citizen from citizen amongst the people, the stronger is the bend of the human mind as if by its own impulse towards the idea of an only and all powerful being dispensing equal laws in the same manner to every man. In democratic ages then it is more particularly important not to allow the homage paid to secondary agents to be confounded with the worship due to the creator alone. Another truth is no less clear, that religions ought to assume fewer external observances in democratic periods than at any others. In speaking of philosophical method among the Americans I've shown that nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms. Men living at such times are impatient of figures. To their eyes symbols appear to be the plural artifice which is used to conceal or to set off truths which should more naturally be bared to the light of open day. They are unmoved by ceremonial observances and they are predisposed to attach a secondary importance to the details of public worship. Those whose care it is to regulate the external forms of religion in a democratic age should pay a close attention to these natural propensities of the human mind in order not unnecessarily to run counter to them. I firmly believe in the necessity of forms which fix the human mind in the contemplation of abstract truths and stimulate its ardor in the pursuit of them whilst they invigorate its powers of retaining them steadfastly. Nor do I suppose that it is possible to maintain a religion without external observances. But on the other hand I am persuaded that in the ages upon which we are entering it would be peculiarly dangerous to multiply them beyond measure and that they ought rather to be limited to as much as is absolutely necessary to perpetuate the doctrine itself, which is a substance of religions of which the ritual is only the form. A religion which should become more minute, more paramatory and more so charged with small observances at a time in which men are becoming more equal would soon find itself reduced to a band of fanatical zealots in the midst of an infidel people. I anticipate the objection that as all religions have general and internal truths for their object they cannot thus shape themselves to the shifting spirit of every age without forfeiting their claim to certainty in the eyes of mankind. To this I reply again that the principal opinions which constitute belief and which theologians call articles of faith must be very carefully distinguished from the accessories connected with them. Religions are obliged to hold fast to the former, whatever be the peculiar spirit of the age, but they should take good care not to bind themselves in the same manner to the latter at a time when everything is in transition and when the mind accustomed to the moving pageant of human affairs reluctantly endures the attempt to fix it to any given point. The fixity of external and secondary things can only afford a change of duration when civil society is itself fixed under any other circumstances I hold it to be perilous. We shall have occasion to see that of all the passions which originate in or are fostered by equality. There is one which it renders peculiarly intense and which it infuses at the same time into the heart of every man. I mean the love of well-being. The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic ages. It may be believed that a religion which should undertake to destroy so deep-seated a passion would meet its own destruction thence in the end. And if it attempted to wean man entirely from the contemplation of the good things of this world in order to devote their faculties exclusively to the thought of another, it may be foreseen that the soul would at length escape from its grasp to plunge into the exclusive enjoyment of present and material pleasures. The chief concern of religions is to purify, to regulate, and to restrain the excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men feel at periods of equality. But they would err in attempting to control it completely or to eradicate it. They will not succeed in curing man of the love of riches, but they may still persuade men to enrich themselves by none but honest means. This brings me to a final consideration which comprises, as it were, all the others. The more the conditions of man are equalized and assimilated to each other, the more important is it for religions whilst they carefully abstain from the daily turmoil of secular affairs, not needlessly to run counter to the ideas which generally prevail and the permanent interests which exist in the mass of the people. For as public opinion grows to be more and more evidently the first and most irresistible of existing powers, the religious principle has no external support strong enough to enable it long to resist its attacks. This is not less true of a democratic people ruled by a despot than in a republic. In ages of equality kings may often command obedience but the majority always commands belief. To the majority therefore deference is to be paid in whatsoever is not contrary to the faith. I showed in my former volumes how the American clergy stand aloof from secular affairs. This is the most obvious but it's not the only example of their self-restraint. In America religion is a distinct sphere in which the priest is sovereign but out of which he takes care never to go. Within its limits he is the master of the mind. Beyond them he leaves man to themselves and surrenders them to the independence and instability which belong to their nature and their age. I have seen no country in which Christianity is clothed with fewer forms figures and observances than in the United States or where it presents more distinct more simple or more general notions to the mind. Although the Christians of America are divided into a multitude of sects they all look upon their religion in the same light. This applies to Roman Catholicism as well as to the other forms of belief. There are no Romish priests who show less taste for the minute individual observances for extraordinary or peculiarity means of salvation or who cling more to the spirit and less to the letter of the law than the Roman Catholic priests of the United States. Nowhere is that doctrine of the Church which prohibits the worship reserved to God alone from being offered to the saints, more clearly inculcated or more generally followed. Yet the Roman Catholics of America are very submissive and very sincere. Another remark is applicable to the clergy of every communion. The American ministers of the Gospel do not attempt to draw or to fix all the thoughts of men upon a life to come. They are willing to surrender a portion of his heart to the cares of the present, seeming to consider the goods of this world as important although as secondary objects. If they take no part themselves in productive labour they are at least interested in its progression and ready to applaud its results. And whilst they never cease to point to the other world as a great object of the hopes and fears of the believer they do not forbid him honestly to quote prosperity in this. Far from attempting to show that these things are distinct and contrary to one another, they study rather to find out on what point they are most nearly and closely connected. All the American clergy know and respect the intellectual supremacy exercised by the majority. They never sustain any but necessary conflicts with it. They take no share in the altercations of parties but they readily adopt the general opinions of their country and their age and they allow themselves to be borne away without a position in the current of feeling and opinion by which everything around them is carried along. They endeavor to amend their contemporaries but they do not quit fellowship with them. Public opinion is therefore never hostile to them. It rather supports and protects them and their belief owes its authority at the same time to the strength which is its own and to that which they borrow from the opinions of the majority. Thus it is that by respecting all democratic tendencies not absolutely contrary to herself and by making use of several of them for our own purposes, religion sustains an advantageous struggle with that spirit of individual independence which is of most dangerous antagonist. Part 1, Chapter 6, of the progress of Roman Catholicism in the United States. America is the most democratic country in the world and it is at the same time, according to reports worthy of belief, the country in which the Roman Catholic religion makes most progress. At first sight this is surprising. Two things must here be accurately distinguished. Equality inclines man to wish to form their own opinions, but on the other hand it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity and impartiality in the power which governs society. Men living in democratic ages are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority, but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind they choose at least that it should be single and uniform. Religious powers, not radiating from a common center, are naturally repugnant to their minds and they almost as readily conceive that there should be no religion as that there should be several. At the present time more than in any preceding one Roman Catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity and Protestants to be converted to Roman Catholicism. If the Roman Catholic faith be considered within the pale of the church it would seem to be losing ground, without that pale to be gaining it, nor is this circumstance difficult of explanation. The men of our days are naturally disposed to believe, but as soon as they have any religion they immediately find in themselves a latent propensity which urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and the practices of the Roman Church astonish them, but they feel a secret admiration for its discipline and its great unity attracts them. If Catholicism could at length withdraw itself from the political animosities to which it has given rise I have hardly any doubt but that the same spirit of the age which appears to be so opposed to it would become so favourable as to admit of its great and sudden advancement. One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. Thus there have ever been and will ever be men who after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from its influence and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience. But I am inclined to believe that the number of these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other ages, and that our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts, some relinquishing Christianity entirely and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome. End of Part 1, Chapter 6 Part 1, Chapters 7 and 8 of Democracy in America, Volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Anna Simon. Democracy in America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve, Part 1, Chapter 7, of the cause of a leaning to pantheism amongst democratic nations. I shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general ideas manifests itself in politics, but I would point out, at the present stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our age. The writings of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it. The Germans introduce it into philosophy and the French into literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed from an accidental, but from a permanent cause. When the conditions of society are becoming more equal and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of seizing to notice the citizens, to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a creator. Still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense being which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroys the individuality of man, nay, rather because it destroys that individuality, will have secret charms from men living in democracies. All their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination. It fosters the pride while it soothes the indolence of their minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. Against it, all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should struggle and combine. Chapter 8. The principle of equality suggests to the Americans the idea of the indefinite perfectability of man. Equality suggests to the human mind several ideas which would not have originated from any other source, and it modifies almost all those previously entertained. I take as an example the idea of human perfectability, because it is one of the principle notions the intellect can conceive, and because it constitutes of itself a great philosophical theory, which is every instant to be traced by its consequences in the practice of human affairs. Although man has many points of resemblance with the brute creation, one characteristic is peculiar to himself. He improves. They are incapable of improvement. Mankind could not fail to discover this difference from its earliest period. The idea of perfectability is therefore as old as the world. Equality did not give birth to it, although it has imparted to it a novel character. When the citizens of a community are classed according to their rank, their profession, or their birth, and when all men are constrained to follow the career which happens to open before them, everyone thinks that the utmost limits of human power are to be discerned in proximity to himself, and none seeks any longer to resist the inevitable law of his destiny. Not indeed that an aristocratic people absolutely contests man's faculty of self-improvement, but they do not hold it to be indefinite. Amelioration they conceive, but not change. They imagine that the future condition of society may be better, but not essentially different. And whilst they admit that mankind has made vast strides in improvement, and may still have some to make, they assign to it beforehand certain impossible limits. Thus they do not presume that they have arrived at the supreme good or at absolute truth, what people or what man was ever wild enough to imagine it, but they cherish a persuasion that they have pretty nearly reached that degree of greatness and knowledge which our imperfect nature admits of, and as nothing moves about them, they are willing to fancy that everything is in its fit place. Then it is that the legislator affects to lay down eternal laws, that kings and nations will raise none but imperishable monuments, and that the present generation undertakes to spare generations to come the care of regulating their decennies. In proportion as castes disappear and the classes of society approximate, as manas, customs and laws vary from the tumultuous intercourse of men, as new effects arise, as new truths are brought to light, as ancient opinions are dissipated and others take their place, the image of an ideal perfection forever on the wing presents itself to the human mind. Continual changes are then every instant occurring under the observation of every man, the position of some is rendered worse, and he learns but too well that no people and no individual, how enlightened so ever they may be, can lay claim to infallibility. The conditions of others is improved, once he infers that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement. His reverses teach him that none may hope to have discovered absolute good. His success stimulates him to the never-ending pursuit of it. Thus, forever seeking, forever falling to rise again, often disappointed but not discouraged, he tends unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long trek which humanity has yet to tread. It can hardly be believed how many effects naturally flow from the philosophical theory of the indefinite perfectibility of man, or how strong an influence it exercises even on men who, living entirely for the purposes of action, and not of thought, seem to conform their actions to it without knowing anything about it. I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time. He answers, without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years. In these words, which fell accidentally and on a particular subject from a man of rude attainment, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people directs all its concerns. Aristocratic nations are naturally too apt to narrow the scope of human perfectibility, democratic nations to expand it beyond compass. End of Part 1, chapters 7 and 8. Part 1, chapters 9 and 10 of Democracy in America, volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Democracy in America, volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve. Part 1, chapter 9. The example of the Americans does not prove that a democratic people can have no aptitude and no taste for science, literature, or art. It must be acknowledged that amongst few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United States, and in few have great artists, fine poets or celebrated writers been more rare. Many Europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and inevitable result of equality, and they have supposed that if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions were ever to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually find its beacon lights grow dim, and man would relapse into a period of darkness. To reason thus is, I think, to confound several ideas which it is important to divide and to examine separately. It is to mingle, unintentionally, what is democratic with what is only American. The religion professed by the first emigrants, and bequated by them to their descendants, simple in its form of worship, austere and almost harsh in its principles, and hostile to external symbols and to ceremonial pump, is naturally unfavorable to the fine arts, and only yields a reluctant sufferance to the pleasures of literature. The Americans are a very old and a very enlightened people who have fallen upon a new and unbounded country where they may extend themselves at pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. This state of things is without a parallel in the history of the world. In America, then, everyone finds facilities unknown elsewhere for making or increasing his fortune. The spirit of gain is always on the stretch, and the human mind, constantly diverted from the pleasures of imagination and the labors of the intellect, is there swayed by no impulse but the pursuit of wealth. Not only are manufacturing and commercial classes to be founded in the United States, as they are in all other countries, but what never occurred elsewhere, the whole community is simultaneously engaged in productive industry and commerce. I am convinced that if the Americans had been alone in the world with the freedom and the knowledge acquired by their forefathers and the passions which are their own, they would not have been slow to discover that progress cannot long be made in the application of the sciences without cultivating the theory of them, that all the arts are perfected by one another, and, however absorbed they might have been by the pursuit of the principal object of their desires, they would speedily have admitted that it is necessary to turn aside from it occasionally in order the better to attain it in the end. The taste for the pleasures of the mind is moreover so natural to the heart of civilized man that amongst the polite nations which are least disposed to give themselves up to these pursuits, a certain number of citizens are always to be found who take part in them. This intellectual craving, when once felt, would very soon have been satisfied, but at the very time when the Americans were naturally inclined to require nothing of science but its special applications to the useful arts and the means of rendering life comfortable, learned and literary Europe was engaged in exploring the common source of truth, and in improving at the same time all that can minister to the pleasures or satisfy the wants of man. At the head of the enlightened nations of the old world, the inhabitants of the United States more particularly distinguished one to which they were closely united by a common origin and by kindred habits. Amongst these people they found distinguished men of science, artists of skill, writers of eminence, and they were enabled to enjoy the treasures of the intellect without requiring to labor in amassing them. I cannot consent to separate America from Europe in spite of the ocean which intervenes. I consider the people of the United States as that portion of the English people which is commissioned to explore the wilds of the new world. Whilst the rest of the nation, enjoying more leisure and less harassed by the drudgery of life, may devote its energies to thought and enlarge in all directions the empire of the mind. The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. They are strictly puritanical origin. They are exclusively of commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts. The proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward. His religion alone bids him turn from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease then to view all democratic nations under the mask of the American people, and let us attempt to survey them at length with their own proper features. It is possible to conceive a people not subdivided into any castes or scale of ranks, in which the law, recognizing no privileges, should divide inherited property into equal shares, but which at the same time should be without knowledge and without freedom. Nor is this an empty hypothesis. A despot may find that it is his interest to render his subjects equal and to leave them ignorant in order more easily to keep them slaves. Not only would a democratic people of this kind show neither aptitude nor taste for science, literature, or art, but it would probably never arrive at the possession of them. The law of descent would of itself provide for the destruction of fortunes at each succeeding generation, and new fortunes would be acquired by none. The poor man, without either knowledge or freedom, would not so much as conceive the idea of raising himself to wealth, and the rich man would allow himself to be degraded to poverty without a notion of self-defense. Between these two members of the community, complete and invincible equality would soon be established. No one would then have time or taste to devote himself to the pursuits or pleasures of the intellect, but all men would remain paralyzed by a state of common ignorance and equal servitude. When I conceive a democratic society of this kind, I fancy myself in one of those low, close, and gloomy abodes where the light which breaks in from without soon fades and fades away. A sudden heaviness overpowers me and I grope through the surrounding darkness to find the aperture which will restore me to daylight and the air. But all this is not applicable to men already enlightened who retain their freedom after having abolished from amongst them those peculiar and hereditary rights which perpetuated the tenure of property in the hands of certain individuals or certain bodies. When men living in a democratic state of society are enlightened, they readily discover that they are confined and fixed within known limits which constrain them to take up with their present fortune. They all therefore conceive the idea of increasing it. If they are free, they all attempt it, but all do not succeed in the same manner. The legislator it is true, no longer grants privileges, but they are bestowed by nature. As natural inequality is very great, fortunes become unequal as soon as every man exerts all his faculties to get rich. The law of dissent prevents the establishment of wealthy families, but it does not prevent the existence of wealthy individuals. It constantly brings back the members of the community to a common level from which they constantly escape, and the inequality of fortunes augments in proportion as knowledge is diffused and liberty increased. A sect which arose in our time and was celebrated for its talents and its extravagance proposed to concentrate all property into the hands of a central power whose function it should afterwards be to parcel it out to individuals according to their capacity. This would have been a method of escaping from that complete and eternal equality which seems to threaten democratic society, but it would be a simpler and less dangerous remedy to grant no privilege to any, giving to all equal cultivation and equal independence, and leaving everyone to determine his own position. Natural inequality will very soon make way for itself, and wealth will spontaneously pass into the hands of the most capable. Free and democratic communities then will always contain a considerable number of people enjoying opulence or competency. The wealthy will not be so closely linked to each other as the members of the former aristocratic class of society. Their propensities will be different, and they will scarcely ever enjoy leisure as secure or as complete, but they will be far more numerous than those who belong to that class of society could ever be. These persons will not be strictly confined to the cares of practical life, and they will still be able, though in different degrees, to indulge in the pursuits and pleasures of the intellect. In those pleasures they will indulge, for if it be true that the human mind leans on one side to the narrow, the practical, and the useful, it naturally rises on the other to the infinite, the spiritual, and the beautiful. Physical ones confine it to the earth, but as soon as the tie is loosened it will unbend itself again. Not only will the number of those who can take an interest in the productions of the mind be enlarged, but the taste for intellectual enjoyment will descend step by step, even to those who, in aristocratic societies, seem to have neither time nor ability to indulge in them. When hereditary wealth, the privileges of rank, and the prerogatives of birth have ceased to be, and when every man derives a strength through himself alone, it becomes evident that the chief cause of disparity between the fortunes of men is the mind. Whatever tends to invigorate, to extend, or to adorn the mind, instantly rises to great value. The utility of knowledge becomes singularly conspicuous even to the eyes of the multitude. Those who have no taste for its charms set store upon its results, and make some efforts to acquire it. In free and enlightened democratic ages there is nothing to separate men from each other, or to retain them in their peculiar sphere. They arise or sink with extreme rapidity. All classes live in perpetual intercourse from their great proximity to each other. They communicate and intermingle every day. They imitate and envy one another. This suggests to the people many ideas, notions and desires which it would never have entertained if the distinctions of rank had been fixed and society at rest. In such nations the servant never considers himself as an entire stranger to the pleasures and toils of his master, nor the poor men to those of the rich. The rural population assimilates itself to that of the towns and the provinces to the capital. No one easily allows himself to be reduced to the mere material cares of life, and the humblest artisan casts at times an eager and a furtive glance into the higher regions of the intellect. People do not read with the same notions or in the same manner as they do in an aristocratic community, but the circle of readers is unceasingly expanded till it includes all the citizens. As soon as the multitude begins to take an interest in the labors of the mind, it finds out that to excel in some of them is a powerful method of acquiring fame, power or wealth. The restless ambition which equality begets instantly takes this direction as it does all others. The number of those who cultivate science, letters and the arts becomes immense. The intellectual world starts into prodigious activity. Everyone endeavours to open for himself apart there and to draw the eyes of the public after him. Something analogous occurs to what happens in society in the United States politically considered. What is done is often imperfect, but the attempts are innumerable, and although the results of individual effort are commonly very small, the total amount is always very large. It is therefore not true to assert that men living in democratic ages are naturally indifferent to science, literature and the arts. Only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them after their own fashion and bring to the task their own peculiar qualifications and deficiencies. Chapter 10. Why the Americans are more addicted to practical than to theoretical science If a democratic state of society and democratic institutions do not stop the career of the human mind, they incontestably guided in one direction in preference to another. Their effects, thus circumscribed, are still exceedingly great, and I trust I may be pardoned if I pause for a moment to survey them. We had occasion, in speaking of the philosophical method of the American people, to make several remarks which must here be turned to account. Equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything for himself. It gives him in all things a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms. These general tendencies are principally discernible in the peculiar subject of this chapter. Those who cultivate the sciences amongst the democratic people are always afraid of losing their way in visionary speculation. They mistrust systems. They adhere closely to facts and the study of facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man's authority. But, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to point out the weaker points of their neighbor's opinions. Scientific precedents have very little weight with them. They are never along detained by the subtlety of the schools, nor ready to accept big words for sterling coin. They penetrate, as far as they can, into the principal parts of the subject which engages them, and they expound them in the vernacular tongue. Scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a safer course, but a less lofty one. The mind may, as it appears to me, divide science into three parts. The first comprises the most theoretical principles, and those more abstract notions whose application is either unknown or very remote. The second is composed of those general truths which still belong to pure theory, but lead nevertheless by a straight and short road to practical results. Methods of application and means of execution make up the third. Each of these different portions of science may be separately cultivated, although reason and experience show that none of them can prosper along if it be absolutely cut off from the two others. In America the purely practical part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original and inventive power of mind, but hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry to excess a tendency which is, I think, discernable, though in a less degree, amongst all democratic nations. Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation, and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. We do not find there, as amongst an aristocratic people, one class which clings to a state of repose because it is well off, and another which does not venture to stir because it despairs of improving its condition. Everyone is actively in motion, some in quest of power, others of gain. In the midst of this universal tumult, this incessant conflict of jarring interests, this continual stride of men after fortune, whereas that can't be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect. How can the mind dwell upon any single point when everything rolls around it, and man himself is swept and beaten onwards by the heady current which rolls all things in its course? But the permanent agitation which subsists in the bosom of a peaceable and established democracy must be distinguished from the tumultuous and revolutionary movements which almost always attend the birth and growth of democratic society. When a violent revolution occurs amongst a highly civilised people, it cannot fail to give a sudden impulse to their feelings and their opinions. This is more particularly true of democratic revolutions which stir up all the classes of which a people is composed and beget at the same time inordinate ambition in the breast of every member of the community. The French made most surprising advances in the exact sciences at the very time at which they were finishing the destruction of the remains of their former feudal society, yet this sudden fecundity is not to be attributed to democracy but to the unexampled revolution which attended its growth. What happened at that period was a special incident and it would be unwise to regard it as a test of a general principle. Great revolutions are not more common amongst democratic nations than amongst others. I am even inclined to believe that they are less so. But there prevails amongst those populations a small distressing motion, a sort of incessant jostling of man, which annoys and disturbs the mind without exciting or elevating it. Men who live in democratic communities not only seldom indulge in meditation but they naturally entertain very little esteem for it. A democratic state of society and democratic institutions plunge the greater part of men in constant active life, and the habits of mind which are suited to an active life are not always suited to contemplative one. The man of action is frequently obliged to content himself with the best he can get, because he would never accomplish his purpose if he chose to carry every detail to perfection. He has perpetually occasioned to rely on ideas which he has not had leisure to search to the bottom, for he is much more frequently aided by the opportunity of an idea than by its strict accuracy, and in the long run he risks less in making use of some false principles than in spending his time in establishing all his principles on the basis of truth. The world is not led by long or learned demonstrations. A rapid glance at particular incidents, the daily study of the fleeting passions of the multitude, the accidents of the time, and the art of turning them to account, decide all its affairs. In the ages in which active life is the condition of almost everyone, men are therefore generally led to attach an excessive value to the rapid bursts and superficial conceptions of the intellect, and on the other hand to depreciate below their true standard its slower and deeper labours. This opinion of the public influences the judgment of the men who cultivate the sciences. They are persuaded that they may succeed in those pursuits without meditation, or deterred from such pursuits as demanded. There are several methods of studying the sciences. Amongst a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile and trading taste for the discoveries of the mind which must not be confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in the heart of the few. A desire to utilize knowledge is one thing, the pure desire to know is another. I do not doubt that in a few minds and far between an ardent inexhaustible love of truth springs up, self-supported and living in ceaseless fruition without ever attaining the satisfaction which it seeks. This ardent love it is, this proud disinterested love of what is true, which raises men to the abstract sources of truth, to draw their mother-knowledge dense. If Pascal had had nothing in view but some large gain, or even if he had been stimulated by the love of fame alone, I cannot conceive that he would ever have been able to rally all the powers of his mind as he did for the better discovery of the most hidden things of the Creator. When I see him, as it were, tear his soul from the midst of all the cares of life to devote it wholly to these researchers, and prematurely snapping the links which bind the frame to life, die of old age before forty, I stand amazed, and I perceive that no ordinary cause is at work to produce efforts so extraordinary. The future will prove whether these passions, at once so rare and so productive, come into being and into growth as easily in the midst of democratic as in aristocratic communities. For myself I confess that I am slow to believe it. In aristocratic society the class which gives the tone to opinion and has the supreme guidance of affairs, being permanently and hereditarily placed above the multitude, naturally conceives a lofty idea of itself and of man. It loves to invent for him noble pleasures, to carve out splendid objects for his ambition. Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and very inhuman actions, but they rarely entertain groveling thoughts, and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures even whilst they indulge in them. The effect is greatly to raise the general pitch of society. In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man. These opinions exert their influence on those who cultivate the sciences, as well as on the rest of the community. They facilitate the natural impulse of the mind to the highest regions of thought, and they naturally prepare to conceive a sublime, nay almost divine, love of truth. Men of science at such periods are consequently carried away by theory, and it even happens that they frequently conceive an inconsiderate contempt for the practical part of learning. Our comedist, says Plutarch, quote, was of so lofty a spirit that he never condescended to write any treatise on the manner of constructing all these engines of offense and defence, and as he held this science of inventing and putting together engines, and all arts generally speaking, which tended to any useful end in practice, to be vile, low, and mercenary, he spent his talents and his studious hours in writing of those things only whose beauty and subtlety had in them no admixture of necessity. End quote. Such is the aristocratic aim of science. In democratic nations it cannot be the same. The greater part of the men who constitute these nations are extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical gratification, as they are always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy, and are always free to leave it. They think of nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing it. To mind's thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labour, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. It is chiefly from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits, that it understands, and that it respects them. In aristocratic ages, science is more particularly called upon to furnish gratification to the mind, in democracies to the body. You may be sure that the more a nation is democratic, enlightened, and free, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius, and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer gain, fame, and even power on their authors. For in democracies the working class takes a part in public affairs, and public honours as well as pecuniary remuneration may be awarded to those who deserve them. In a community thus organised it may easily be conceived that a human mind may be led insensibly to the neglect of theory, and that it is urged, on the contrary, with unparalleled vehemence to the applications of science, or at least to that portion of theoretical science which is necessary to those who make such applications. In vain will some innate propensity raise the mind towards the loftier spheres of the intellect. Interest draws it down to the middle zone. There it may develop all its energy and restless activity. There it may engender all its wonders. These very Americans who have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics have introduced into navigation an engine which changes the aspect of the world. Assurately I do not content that the democratic nations of our time are destined to witness the extinction of the transcendent luminaries of man's intelligence, nor even that no new lights will ever start into existence. At the age at which the world has now arrived, and amongst so many cultivated nations, perpetually excited by the fever of productive industry, the bonds which connect the different parts of science together cannot fail to strike the observation, and the taste for practical science itself, if it be enlightened, ought to lead man not to neglect theory. In the midst of such numberless attempted applications of so many experiments repeated every day, it is almost impossible that general laws should not frequently be brought to light, so that great discoveries would be frequent, though great inventors be rare. I believe moreover in the high calling of scientific minds. If the democratic principle does not on the one hand induce men to cultivate science for its own sake, on the other it enormously increases the number of those who do cultivate it. Nor is it credible that from amongst so great a multitude no speculative genius should from time to time arise, inflamed by the love of truth alone. Such a one, we may be sure, would dive into the deepest mysteries of nature whatever be the spirit of his country or his age. He requires no assistance in his course, enough that he be not checked in it. All that I mean to say is this. Permanent inequality of conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arrogant and sterile research of abstract truth, whilst the social condition and the institutions of democracy prepare them to seek the immediate and useful practical results of the sciences. This tendency is natural and inevitable. It is curious to be acquainted with it, and it may be necessary to point it out. If those who are called upon to guide the nations of our time, clearly discerned from afar off these new tendencies which will soon be irresistible, they would understand that possessing education and freedom, men living in democratic ages cannot fail to improve the industrial part of science, and that hence forward all the efforts of the constituted authorities ought to be directed to support the highest branches of learning, and to foster the nobler passion for science itself. In the present age the human mind must be coerced into theoretical studies. It runs of its own accord to practical applications, and instead of perpetually referring it to the minute examination of secondary effects, it is well to divert it from them sometimes in order to raise it up to the contemplation of primary causes. Because the civilization of ancient Rome perished in consequence of the invasion of the barbarians, we are perhaps too apt to think that civilization cannot perish in any other manner. If the light by which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by degrees and expire of itself. By dint of close adherence to mere applications, principles will be lost sight of, and when the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from them would be ill-pursued. New methods could no longer be invented, and men would continue to apply without intelligence and without art, scientific processes no longer understood. When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there, and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered some traces of the higher branches of science which were lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry, the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there. This served to explain the strangely motionless state in which they found the minds of this people. The Chinese, in following the trek of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by which the letter had been guided. They still used the formula without asking for its meaning. They retained the instrument, but they no longer possessed the art of altering or renewing it. The Chinese then had lost the power of change for them to improve what's impossible. They were compelled at all times and in all points to imitate their predecessors, lest they should stray into utter darkness by deviating for an instant from the path already laid down for them. The source of human knowledge was all but dry, and though the stream still ran on, it could neither swell its waters nor alter its channel. Notwithstanding this, China had subsisted peaceably for centuries. The invaders who had conquered the country assumed the manners of the inhabitants and order prevailed there. A sort of physical prosperity was everywhere discernible. Revolutions were rare, and war was, so to speak, unknown. It is then a fallacy to flatter ourselves with a reflection that the barbarians are still far from us, for if there be some nations which allow civilization to be torn from their grasp, there are others who trample it themselves under their feet.