← catalogue

Democracy in America — Volume 2

by Alexis de Tocqueville · English · Gutenberg #816 · 852,040 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Democracy in America — Volume 2
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Democracy in America — Volume 2

Author: Alexis de Tocqueville

Translator: Henry Reeve


        
Release date: January 21, 2006 [eBook #816]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/816

Credits: Produced by David Reed and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA — VOLUME 2 ***




Produced by David Reed and David Widger





DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

By Alexis De Tocqueville


Translated by Henry Reeve





Book Two: 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 to 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 owe 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
that few would dare to point out from afar the dangers with which
it threatens them. To those 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,
I have endeavored 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.

A. De T.

March, 1840




Section I: Influence of Democracy on the Action of Intellect in The
United States.




Chapter I: 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 one's self, and in one's self 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 ipse 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 an 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 light of day. This
disposition of the mind soon leads them to contemn 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 the one nor 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 those 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
American 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 strong hold on
the public mind in America; and, I would more particularly remark, that
its sway 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 sects 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, enervate
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 a void and 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, tends 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 it
would 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 appears 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 II: 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; and this cannot
be the case, 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, than it
is to enable him to co-operate 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 is 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 impious 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 they that 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 gives them 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 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, morals, 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 a 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, and the majority its
ministering prophet.

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 discern 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 favorable; 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, for all the different powers which checked or
retarded overmuch 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 lie 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.




Chapter III: 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 severally 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 collecting a considerable number
of analogous objects under the same form for greater convenience in
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 it astray
and bewilder its discernment: in this strait, 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 their 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 and alike applicable to several 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 in accuracy as it gains
in comprehensiveness. 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 a people of ancient cultivation 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 a 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 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, conceive 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, one very 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 in 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 undiscerning,
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 that those of the ancients who had passed from the
servile to the free condition, many of whom have left us excellent
writings, did themselves regard servitude in no other light.

All the great writers of antiquity belonged 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 superinduces 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 or 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 a very aristocratic
nation; their enlightened condition urged them constantly to generalize,
and their aristocratic habits confined 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 obtects, inquiry is 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 fain 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 can figure 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 averse 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
this kind to excess, and to espouse the with injudicious warmth.




Chapter IV: Why The Americans Have Never Been So Eager As The French For
General Ideas In 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 and 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 eighteenth century, or displayed 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 led that people 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 in 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 which compel every
citizen to take a practical part in the government, moderate that
excessive taste for general theories in politics which the principle of
equality suggests.




Chapter V: 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 men cannot do without
dogmatical belief; and even that it is very much to be desired that such
belief should exist amongst them. I now add, that of all the kinds of
dogmatical belief 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 to 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 enshrouded 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 man has been tossed about for thousands of
years, without either laying a firmer 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 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.

General 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 have 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 salutary restraint on the intellect; and it must be
admitted that, if it do not save men in another world, such religion is
at least very conducive to their happiness and their greatness in this.
This is more especially true of men living in free countries. When
the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the highest
portions 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 subjects 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 ignobly 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 in 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 men (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. Mahommed professed to derive from
Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, 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 of the general
relations of men 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, whilst 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 men 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 sceptre of the Caesars. 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 truths 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. Men 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. The homage 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 a people, the stronger is the bent 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 have 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 puerile 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
the substance of religions of which the ritual is only the form. *a
A religion which should become more minute, more peremptory, and more
surcharged 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.

[Footnote a: In all religions there are some ceremonies which are
inherent in the substance of the faith itself, and in these nothing
should, on any account, be changed. This is especially the case with
Roman Catholicism, in which the doctrine and the form are frequently so
closely united as to form one point of belief.]

I anticipate the objection, that as all religions have general and
eternal 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 chance 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 men 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 men 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 men 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 is 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 men 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 peculiar 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 man upon the 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 labor, 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 the great object
of the hopes and fears of the believer, they do not forbid him honestly
to court 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 opposition 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 her own purposes, religion
sustains an advantageous struggle with that spirit of individual
independence which is her most dangerous antagonist.




Chapter VI: 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 men 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 centre 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 Romish 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 favorable 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.




Chapter VII: 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 ceasing 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 destroy the individuality of
man--nay, rather because it destroys that individuality--will have
secret charms for 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,
whilst 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 VIII: The Principle Of Equality Suggests To The Americans The
Idea Of The Indefinite Perfectibility 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
perfectibility, because it is one of the principal notions that 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 perfectibility 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 impassable 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 destinies.

In proportion as castes disappear and the classes of society
approximate--as manners, customs, and laws vary, from the tumultuous
intercourse of men--as new facts 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 soever they may be, can lay claim to
infallibility;--the condition of others is improved; whence 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
track which humanity has yet to tread. It can hardly be believed
how many facts 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
attainments, 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.




Chapter IX: 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 men 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 bequeathed 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 pomp, 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, every one 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 found 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 sources 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
this 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. Their
strictly Puritanical origin--their exclusively 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-defence. 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 faints 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 no 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 legislature, 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 descent 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 as 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 belonged 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 wants 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 in indulge in them.
When hereditary wealth, the privileges of rank, and the prerogatives of
birth have ceased to be, and when every man derives his strength from
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 rise 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 other: 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 man 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
endeavors to open for himself a path 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 X: 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 guide it 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 a 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 neighbors' opinions. Scientific precedents have very
little weight with them; they are never long detained by the subtilty
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 long, 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, discernible,
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--where is
that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations
of the intellect? How can the mind dwell upon any single point, when
everything whirls 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
civilized 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 the 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 men--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 a
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 occasion 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 labors. 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
demand it.

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 thence. 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
researches, 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 extra-ordinary.

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 grovelling 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 it to conceive
a sublime--nay, almost a 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. "Archimedes," says Plutarch, "was of so
lofty a spirit, that he never condescended to write any treatise on the
manner of constructing all these engines of offence 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 subtilty had in them
no admixture of necessity." 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 minds thus predisposed, every new
method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which
spares labor, 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
honors, as well as pecuniary remuneration, may be awarded to those who
deserve them. In a community thus organized it may easily be conceived
that the 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.

Assuredly 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 men 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 truths; 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 henceforward 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
would 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 track of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by
which the latter 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 was 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 the 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.




Chapter XI: Of The Spirit In Which The Americans Cultivate The Arts

It would be to waste the time of my readers and my own if I strove
to demonstrate how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the absence of
superfluous wealth, the universal desire of comfort, and the constant
efforts by which everyone attempts to procure it, make the taste for the
useful predominate over the love of the beautiful in the heart of man.
Democratic nations, amongst which all these things exist, will therefore
cultivate the arts which serve to render life easy, in preference to
those whose object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the
useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should
be useful. But I propose to go further; and after having pointed out
this first feature, to sketch several others.

It commonly happens that in the ages of privilege the practice of
almost all the arts becomes a privilege; and that every profession is
a separate walk, upon which it is not allowable for everyone to enter.
Even when productive industry is free, the fixed character which
belongs to aristocratic nations gradually segregates all the persons who
practise the same art, till they form a distinct class, always composed
of the same families, whose members are all known to each other, and
amongst whom a public opinion of their own and a species of corporate
pride soon spring up. In a class or guild of this kind, each artisan has
not only his fortune to make, but his reputation to preserve. He is not
exclusively swayed by his own interest, or even by that of his customer,
but by that of the body to which he belongs; and the interest of that
body is, that each artisan should produce the best possible workmanship.
In aristocratic ages, the object of the arts is therefore to manufacture
as well as possible--not with the greatest despatch, or at the lowest
rate.

When, on the contrary, every profession is open to all--when a multitude
of persons are constantly embracing and abandoning it--and when its
several members are strangers to each other, indifferent, and from their
numbers hardly seen amongst themselves; the social tie is destroyed,
and each workman, standing alone, endeavors simply to gain the greatest
possible quantity of money at the least possible cost. The will of the
customer is then his only limit. But at the same time a corresponding
revolution takes place in the customer also. In countries in which
riches as well as power are concentrated and retained in the hands of
the few, the use of the greater part of this world's goods belongs to a
small number of individuals, who are always the same. Necessity, public
opinion, or moderate desires exclude all others from the enjoyment
of them. As this aristocratic class remains fixed at the pinnacle of
greatness on which it stands, without diminution or increase, it is
always acted upon by the same wants and affected by them in the same
manner. The men of whom it is composed naturally derive from their
superior and hereditary position a taste for what is extremely well made
and lasting. This affects the general way of thinking of the nation in
relation to the arts. It often occurs, among such a people, that even
the peasant will rather go without the object he covets, than procure it
in a state of imperfection. In aristocracies, then, the handicraftsmen
work for only a limited number of very fastidious customers: the
profit they hope to make depends principally on the perfection of their
workmanship.

Such is no longer the case when, all privileges being abolished, ranks
are intermingled, and men are forever rising or sinking upon the ladder
of society. Amongst a democratic people a number of citizens always
exist whose patrimony is divided and decreasing. They have contracted,
under more prosperous circumstances, certain wants, which remain after
the means of satisfying such wants are gone; and they are anxiously
looking out for some surreptitious method of providing for them. On the
other hand, there are always in democracies a large number of men whose
fortune is upon the increase, but whose desires grow much faster than
their fortunes: and who gloat upon the gifts of wealth in anticipation,
long before they have means to command them. Such men eager to find some
short cut to these gratifications, already almost within their reach.
From the combination of these causes the result is, that in democracies
there are always a multitude of individuals whose wants are above their
means, and who are very willing to take up with imperfect satisfaction
rather than abandon the object of their desires.

The artisan readily understands these passions, for he himself partakes
in them: in an aristocracy he would seek to sell his workmanship at a
high price to the few; he now conceives that the more expeditious way of
getting rich is to sell them at a low price to all. But there are only
two ways of lowering the price of commodities. The first is to discover
some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them: the
second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar,
but of less value. Amongst a democratic population, all the intellectual
faculties of the workman are directed to these two objects: he strives
to invent methods which may enable him not only to work better, but
quicker and cheaper; or, if he cannot succeed in that, to diminish the
intrinsic qualities of the thing he makes, without rendering it wholly
unfit for the use for which it is intended. When none but the wealthy
had watches, they were almost all very good ones: few are now made which
are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket. Thus the democratic
principle not only tends to direct the human mind to the useful arts,
but it induces the artisan to produce with greater rapidity a quantity
of imperfect commodities, and the consumer to content himself with these
commodities.

Not that in democracies the arts are incapable of producing very
commendable works, if such be required. This may occasionally be the
case, if customers appear who are ready to pay for time and trouble.
In this rivalry of every kind of industry--in the midst of this immense
competition and these countless experiments, some excellent workmen are
formed who reach the utmost limits of their craft. But they have rarely
an opportunity of displaying what they can do; they are scrupulously
sparing of their powers; they remain in a state of accomplished
mediocrity, which condemns itself, and, though it be very well able
to shoot beyond the mark before it, aims only at what it hits. In
aristocracies, on the contrary, workmen always do all they can; and
when they stop, it is because they have reached the limit of their
attainments.

When I arrive in a country where I find some of the finest productions
of the arts, I learn from this fact nothing of the social condition or
of the political constitution of the country. But if I perceive that
the productions of the arts are generally of an inferior quality, very
abundant and very cheap, I am convinced that, amongst the people where
this occurs, privilege is on the decline, and that ranks are beginning
to intermingle, and will soon be confounded together.

The handicraftsmen of democratic ages endeavor not only to bring their
useful productions within the reach of the whole community, but they
strive to give to all their commodities attractive qualities which they
do not in reality possess. In the confusion of all ranks everyone hopes
to appear what he is not, and makes great exertions to succeed in this
object. This sentiment indeed, which is but too natural to the heart of
man, does not originate in the democratic principle; but that principle
applies it to material objects. To mimic virtue is of every age; but the
hypocrisy of luxury belongs more particularly to the ages of democracy.

To satisfy these new cravings of human vanity the arts have recourse to
every species of imposture: and these devices sometimes go so far as to
defeat their own purpose. Imitation diamonds are now made which may be
easily mistaken for real ones; as soon as the art of fabricating false
diamonds shall have reached so high a degree of perfection that they
cannot be distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both one and
the other will be abandoned, and become mere pebbles again.

This leads me to speak of those arts which are called the fine arts, by
way of distinction. I do not believe that it is a necessary effect of a
democratic social condition and of democratic institutions to diminish
the number of men who cultivate the fine arts; but these causes exert
a very powerful influence on the manner in which these arts are
cultivated. Many of those who had already contracted a taste for the
fine arts are impoverished: on the other hand, many of those who are not
yet rich begin to conceive that taste, at least by imitation; and the
number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers
become more scarce. Something analogous to what I have already
pointed out in the useful arts then takes place in the fine arts;
the productions of artists are more numerous, but the merit of each
production is diminished. No longer able to soar to what is great, they
cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended
to than reality. In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced;
in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones. In the
former, statues are raised of bronze; in the latter, they are modelled
in plaster.

When I arrived for the first time at New York, by that part of the
Atlantic Ocean which is called the Narrows, I was surprised to perceive
along the shore, at some distance from the city, a considerable number
of little palaces of white marble, several of which were built after the
models of ancient architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more
closely the building which had particularly attracted my notice, I found
that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted
wood. All the edifices which I had admired the night before were of the
same kind.

The social condition and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover,
certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which it is easy
to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the
soul to fix them exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute
the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and
thought: in a word, they put the real in the place of the ideal. I doubt
whether Raphael studied the minutest intricacies of the mechanism of the
human body as thoroughly as the draughtsmen of our own time. He did not
attach the same importance to rigorous accuracy on this point as they
do, because he aspired to surpass nature. He sought to make of man
something which should be superior to man, and to embellish beauty's
self. David and his scholars were, on the contrary, as good anatomists
as they were good painters. They wonderfully depicted the models which
they had before their eyes, but they rarely imagined anything beyond
them: they followed nature with fidelity: whilst Raphael sought for
something better than nature. They have left us an exact portraiture
of man; but he discloses in his works a glimpse of the Divinity. This
remark as to the manner of treating a subject is no less applicable to
the choice of it. The painters of the Middle Ages generally sought far
above themselves, and away from their own time, for mighty subjects,
which left to their imagination an unbounded range. Our painters
frequently employ their talents in the exact imitation of the details
of private life, which they have always before their eyes; and they are
forever copying trivial objects, the originals of which are only too
abundant in nature.




Chapter XII: Why The Americans Raise Some Monuments So Insignificant,
And Others So Important

I have just observed, that in democratic ages monuments of the arts tend
to become more numerous and less important. I now hasten to point out
the exception to this rule. In a democratic community individuals are
very powerless; but the State which represents them all, and contains
them all in its grasp, is very powerful. Nowhere do citizens appear so
insignificant as in a democratic nation; nowhere does the nation itself
appear greater, or does the mind more easily take in a wide general
survey of it. In democratic communities the imagination is compressed
when men consider themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think
of the State. Hence it is that the same men who live on a small scale in
narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor in the erection
of their public monuments.

The Americans traced out the circuit of an immense city on the site
which they intended to make their capital, but which, up to the present
time, is hardly more densely peopled than Pontoise, though, according
to them, it will one day contain a million of inhabitants. They have
already rooted up trees for ten miles round, lest they should interfere
with the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have erected
a magnificent palace for Congress in the centre of the city, and have
given it the pompous name of the Capitol. The several States of the
Union are every day planning and erecting for themselves prodigious
undertakings, which would astonish the engineers of the great European
nations. Thus democracy not only leads men to a vast number of
inconsiderable productions; it also leads them to raise some monuments
on the largest scale: but between these two extremes there is a blank.
A few scattered remains of enormous buildings can therefore teach us
nothing of the social condition and the institutions of the people by
whom they were raised. I may add, though the remark leads me to step
out of my subject, that they do not make us better acquainted with its
greatness, its civilization, and its real prosperity. Whensoever a power
of any kind shall be able to make a whole people co-operate in a single
undertaking, that power, with a little knowledge and a great deal of
time, will succeed in obtaining something enormous from the co-operation
of efforts so multiplied. But this does not lead to the conclusion that
the people was very happy, very enlightened, or even very strong.

The Spaniards found the City of Mexico full of magnificent temples
and vast palaces; but that did not prevent Cortes from conquering the
Mexican Empire with 600 foot soldiers and sixteen horses. If the Romans
had been better acquainted with the laws of hydraulics, they would not
have constructed all the aqueducts which surround the ruins of their
cities--they would have made a better use of their power and their
wealth. If they had invented the steam-engine, perhaps they would not
have extended to the extremities of their empire those long artificial
roads which are called Roman roads. These things are at once the
splendid memorials of their ignorance and of their greatness. A people
which should leave no other vestige of its track than a few leaden pipes
in the earth and a few iron rods upon its surface, might have been more
the master of nature than the Romans.




Chapter XIII: Literary Characteristics Of Democratic Ages

When a traveller goes into a bookseller's shop in the United States,
and examines the American books upon the shelves, the number of works
appears extremely great; whilst that of known authors appears, on the
contrary, to be extremely small. He will first meet with a number
of elementary treatises, destined to teach the rudiments of human
knowledge. Most of these books are written in Europe; the Americans
reprint them, adapting them to their own country. Next comes an enormous
quantity of religious works, Bibles, sermons, edifying anecdotes,
controversial divinity, and reports of charitable societies; lastly,
appears the long catalogue of political pamphlets. In America, parties
do not write books to combat each others' opinions, but pamphlets which
are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity, and then expire. In
the midst of all these obscure productions of the human brain are to be
found the more remarkable works of that small number of authors, whose
names are, or ought to be, known to Europeans.

Although America is perhaps in our days the civilized country in
which literature is least attended to, a large number of persons are
nevertheless to be found there who take an interest in the productions
of the mind, and who make them, if not the study of their lives, at
least the charm of their leisure hours. But England supplies these
readers with the larger portion of the books which they require. Almost
all important English books are republished in the United States. The
literary genius of Great Britain still darts its rays into the recesses
of the forests of the New World. There is hardly a pioneer's hut which
does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I
read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.

Not only do the Americans constantly draw upon the treasures of English
literature, but it may be said with truth that they find the literature
of England growing on their own soil. The larger part of that small
number of men in the United States who are engaged in the composition of
literary works are English in substance, and still more so in form.
Thus they transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary
fashions which are current amongst the aristocratic nation they have
taken for their model. They paint with colors borrowed from foreign
manners; and as they hardly ever represent the country they were born
in as it really is, they are seldom popular there. The citizens of the
United States are themselves so convinced that it is not for them that
books are published, that before they can make up their minds upon the
merit of one of their authors, they generally wait till his fame has
been ratified in England, just as in pictures the author of an original
is held to be entitled to judge of the merit of a copy. The inhabitants
of the United States have then at present, properly speaking, no
literature. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the
journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the
language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. Other
authors are aliens; they are to the Americans what the imitators of the
Greeks and Romans were to us at the revival of learning--an object of
curiosity, not of general sympathy. They amuse the mind, but they do not
act upon the manners of the people.

I have already said that this state of things is very far from
originating in democracy alone, and that the causes of it must be sought
for in several peculiar circumstances independent of the democratic
principle. If the Americans, retaining the same laws and social
condition, had had a different origin, and had been transported
into another country, I do not question that they would have had
a literature. Even as they now are, I am convinced that they will
ultimately have one; but its character will be different from that which
marks the American literary productions of our time, and that character
will be peculiarly its own. Nor is it impossible to trace this character
beforehand.

I suppose an aristocratic people amongst whom letters are cultivated;
the labors of the mind, as well as the affairs of state, are conducted
by a ruling class in society. The literary as well as the political
career is almost entirely confined to this class, or to those nearest
to it in rank. These premises suffice to give me a key to all the rest.
When a small number of the same men are engaged at the same time upon
the same objects, they easily concert with one another, and agree upon
certain leading rules which are to govern them each and all. If the
object which attracts the attention of these men is literature, the
productions of the mind will soon be subjected by them to precise
canons, from which it will no longer be allowable to depart. If these
men occupy a hereditary position in the country, they will be naturally
inclined, not only to adopt a certain number of fixed rules for
themselves, but to follow those which their forefathers laid down for
their own guidance; their code will be at once strict and traditional.
As they are not necessarily engrossed by the cares of daily life--as
they have never been so, any more than their fathers were before
them--they have learned to take an interest, for several generations
back, in the labors of the mind. They have learned to understand
literature as an art, to love it in the end for its own sake, and to
feel a scholar-like satisfaction in seeing men conform to its rules. Nor
is this all: the men of whom I speak began and will end their lives in
easy or in affluent circumstances; hence they have naturally conceived
a taste for choice gratifications, and a love of refined and delicate
pleasures. Nay more, a kind of indolence of mind and heart, which they
frequently contract in the midst of this long and peaceful enjoyment
of so much welfare, leads them to put aside, even from their pleasures,
whatever might be too startling or too acute. They had rather be amused
than intensely excited; they wish to be interested, but not to be
carried away.

Now let us fancy a great number of literary performances executed by the
men, or for the men, whom I have just described, and we shall readily
conceive a style of literature in which everything will be regular and
prearranged. The slightest work will be carefully touched in its least
details; art and labor will be conspicuous in everything; each kind of
writing will have rules of its own, from which it will not be allowed to
swerve, and which distinguish it from all others. Style will be thought
of almost as much importance as thought; and the form will be no less
considered than the matter: the diction will be polished, measured,
and uniform. The tone of the mind will be always dignified, seldom very
animated; and writers will care more to perfect what they produce than
to multiply their productions. It will sometimes happen that the members
of the literary class, always living amongst themselves and writing for
themselves alone, will lose sight of the rest of the world, which will
infect them with a false and labored style; they will lay down minute
literary rules for their exclusive use, which will insensibly lead them
to deviate from common-sense, and finally to transgress the bounds of
nature. By dint of striving after a mode of parlance different from
the vulgar, they will arrive at a sort of aristocratic jargon, which is
hardly less remote from pure language than is the coarse dialect of the
people. Such are the natural perils of literature amongst aristocracies.
Every aristocracy which keeps itself entirely aloof from the people
becomes impotent--a fact which is as true in literature as it is in
politics. *a

[Footnote a: All this is especially true of the aristocratic countries
which have been long and peacefully subject to a monarchical government.
When liberty prevails in an aristocracy, the higher ranks are constantly
obliged to make use of the lower classes; and when they use, they
approach them. This frequently introduces something of a democratic
spirit into an aristocratic community. There springs up, moreover, in a
privileged body, governing with energy and an habitually bold policy, a
taste for stir and excitement which must infallibly affect all literary
performances.]

Let us now turn the picture and consider the other side of it; let us
transport ourselves into the midst of a democracy, not unprepared by
ancient traditions and present culture to partake in the pleasures of
the mind. Ranks are there intermingled and confounded; knowledge and
power are both infinitely subdivided, and, if I may use the expression,
scattered on every side. Here then is a motley multitude, whose
intellectual wants are to be supplied. These new votaries of the
pleasures of the mind have not all received the same education; they
do not possess the same degree of culture as their fathers, nor any
resemblance to them--nay, they perpetually differ from themselves,
for they live in a state of incessant change of place, feelings,
and fortunes. The mind of each member of the community is therefore
unattached to that of his fellow-citizens by tradition or by common
habits; and they have never had the power, the inclination, nor the
time to concert together. It is, however, from the bosom of this
heterogeneous and agitated mass that authors spring; and from the same
source their profits and their fame are distributed. I can without
difficulty understand that, under these circumstances, I must expect
to meet in the literature of such a people with but few of those strict
conventional rules which are admitted by readers and by writers in
aristocratic ages. If it should happen that the men of some one period
were agreed upon any such rules, that would prove nothing for the
following period; for amongst democratic nations each new generation is
a new people. Amongst such nations, then, literature will not easily
be subjected to strict rules, and it is impossible that any such rules
should ever be permanent.

In democracies it is by no means the case that all the men who cultivate
literature have received a literary education; and most of those who
have some tinge of belles-lettres are either engaged in politics, or in
a profession which only allows them to taste occasionally and by stealth
the pleasures of the mind. These pleasures, therefore, do not constitute
the principal charm of their lives; but they are considered as a
transient and necessary recreation amidst the serious labors of life.
Such man can never acquire a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the art
of literature to appreciate its more delicate beauties; and the minor
shades of expression must escape them. As the time they can devote to
letters is very short, they seek to make the best use of the whole of
it. They prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and
which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for
beauties, self-proffered and easily enjoyed; above all, they must have
what is unexpected and new. Accustomed to the struggle, the crosses, and
the monotony of practical life, they require rapid emotions, startling
passages--truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up, and to
plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of a subject.

Why should I say more? or who does not understand what is about to
follow, before I have expressed it? Taken as a whole, literature
in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of
aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art; its form
will, on the contrary, ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised. Style
will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose--almost
always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution,
more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be more
common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more
imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks
of an untutored and rude vigor of thought--frequently of great variety
and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather
than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste.
Here and there, indeed, writers will doubtless occur who will choose
a different track, and who will, if they are gifted with superior
abilities, succeed in finding readers, in spite of their defects or
their better qualities; but these exceptions will be rare, and even
the authors who shall so depart from the received practice in the main
subject of their works, will always relapse into it in some lesser
details.

I have just depicted two extreme conditions: the transition by which a
nation passes from the former to the latter is not sudden but gradual,
and marked with shades of very various intensity. In the passage which
conducts a lettered people from the one to the other, there is almost
always a moment at which the literary genius of democratic nations has
its confluence with that of aristocracies, and both seek to establish
their joint sway over the human mind. Such epochs are transient, but
very brilliant: they are fertile without exuberance, and animated
without confusion. The French literature of the eighteenth century may
serve as an example.

I should say more than I mean if I were to assert that the literature of
a nation is always subordinate to its social condition and its political
constitution. I am aware that, independently of these causes, there
are several others which confer certain characteristics on literary
productions; but these appear to me to be the chief. The relations which
exist between the social and political condition of a people and the
genius of its authors are always very numerous: whoever knows the one is
never completely ignorant of the other.




Chapter XIV: The Trade Of Literature

Democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the trading
classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature. In
aristocracies, readers are fastidious and few in number; in democracies,
they are far more numerous and far less difficult to please. The
consequence is, that among aristocratic nations, no one can hope to
succeed without immense exertions, and that these exertions may bestow
a great deal of fame, but can never earn much money; whilst among
democratic nations, a writer may flatter himself that he will obtain at
a cheap rate a meagre reputation and a large fortune. For this
purpose he need not be admired; it is enough that he is liked. The
ever-increasing crowd of readers, and their continual craving for
something new, insure the sale of books which nobody much esteems.

In democratic periods the public frequently treat authors as kings do
their courtiers; they enrich, and they despise them. What more is needed
by the venal souls which are born in courts, or which are worthy to live
there? Democratic literature is always infested with a tribe of writers
who look upon letters as a mere trade: and for some few great authors
who adorn it you may reckon thousands of idea-mongers.




Chapter XV: The Study Of Greek And Latin Literature Peculiarly Useful In
Democratic Communities

What was called the People in the most democratic republics of
antiquity, was very unlike what we designate by that term. In Athens,
all the citizens took part in public affairs; but there were only 20,000
citizens to more than 350,000 inhabitants. All the rest were slaves, and
discharged the greater part of those duties which belong at the present
day to the lower or even to the middle classes. Athens, then, with her
universal suffrage, was after all merely an aristocratic republic in
which all the nobles had an equal right to the government. The struggle
between the patricians and plebeians of Rome must be considered in
the same light: it was simply an intestine feud between the elder and
younger branches of the same family. All the citizens belonged, in fact,
to the aristocracy, and partook of its character.

It is moreover to be remarked, that amongst the ancients books were
always scarce and dear; and that very great difficulties impeded their
publication and circulation. These circumstances concentrated literary
tastes and habits amongst a small number of men, who formed a small
literary aristocracy out of the choicer spirits of the great political
aristocracy. Accordingly nothing goes to prove that literature was ever
treated as a trade amongst the Greeks and Romans.

These peoples, which not only constituted aristocracies, but very
polished and free nations, of course imparted to their literary
productions the defects and the merits which characterize the literature
of aristocratic ages. And indeed a very superficial survey of the
literary remains of the ancients will suffice to convince us, that if
those writers were sometimes deficient in variety, or fertility in their
subjects, or in boldness, vivacity, or power of generalization in
their thoughts, they always displayed exquisite care and skill in their
details. Nothing in their works seems to be done hastily or at random:
every line is written for the eye of the connoisseur, and is shaped
after some conception of ideal beauty. No literature places those fine
qualities, in which the writers of democracies are naturally deficient,
in bolder relief than that of the ancients; no literature, therefore,
ought to be more studied in democratic ages. This study is better suited
than any other to combat the literary defects inherent in those ages; as
for their more praiseworthy literary qualities, they will spring up of
their own accord, without its being necessary to learn to acquire them.

It is important that this point should be clearly understood. A
particular study may be useful to the literature of a people, without
being appropriate to its social and political wants. If men were to
persist in teaching nothing but the literature of the dead languages in
a community where everyone is habitually led to make vehement exertions
to augment or to maintain his fortune, the result would be a very
polished, but a very dangerous, race of citizens. For as their social
and political condition would give them every day a sense of wants which
their education would never teach them to supply, they would perturb the
State, in the name of the Greeks and Romans, instead of enriching it by
their productive industry.

It is evident that in democratic communities the interest of
individuals, as well as the security of the commonwealth, demands that
the education of the greater number should be scientific, commercial,
and industrial, rather than literary. Greek and Latin should not be
taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their
natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters
or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete
knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true
scholar may be formed. A few excellent universities would do more
towards the attainment of this object than a vast number of bad grammar
schools, where superfluous matters, badly learned, stand in the way of
sound instruction in necessary studies.

All who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations, ought
frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient literature:
there is no more wholesome course for the mind. Not that I hold the
literary productions of the ancients to be irreproachable; but I
think that they have some especial merits, admirably calculated to
counterbalance our peculiar defects. They are a prop on the side on
which we are in most danger of falling.




Chapter XVI: The Effect Of Democracy On Language

If the reader has rightly understood what I have already said on
the subject of literature in general, he will have no difficulty in
comprehending that species of influence which a democratic social
condition and democratic institutions may exercise over language itself,
which is the chief instrument of thought.

American authors may truly be said to live more in England than in their
own country; since they constantly study the English writers, and take
them every day for their models. But such is not the case with the bulk
of the population, which is more immediately subjected to the peculiar
causes acting upon the United States. It is not then to the written, but
to the spoken language that attention must be paid, if we would detect
the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo
when it becomes the language of a democracy.

Englishmen of education, and more competent judges than I can be myself
of the nicer shades of expression, have frequently assured me that
the language of the educated classes in the United States is notably
different from that of the educated classes in Great Britain. They
complain not only that the Americans have brought into use a number of
new words--the difference and the distance between the two countries
might suffice to explain that much--but that these new words are more
especially taken from the jargon of parties, the mechanical arts, or the
language of trade. They assert, in addition to this, that old English
words are often used by the Americans in new acceptations; and lastly,
that the inhabitants of the United States frequently intermingle their
phraseology in the strangest manner, and sometimes place words together
which are always kept apart in the language of the mother-country. These
remarks, which were made to me at various times by persons who appeared
to be worthy of credit, led me to reflect upon the subject; and my
reflections brought me, by theoretical reasoning, to the same point at
which my informants had arrived by practical observation.

In aristocracies, language must naturally partake of that state of
repose in which everything remains. Few new words are coined, because
few new things are made; and even if new things were made, they would
be designated by known words, whose meaning has been determined by
tradition. If it happens that the human mind bestirs itself at length,
or is roused by light breaking in from without, the novel expressions
which are introduced are characterized by a degree of learning,
intelligence, and philosophy, which shows that they do not originate
in a democracy. After the fall of Constantinople had turned the tide of
science and literature towards the west, the French language was almost
immediately invaded by a multitude of new words, which had all Greek
or Latin roots. An erudite neologism then sprang up in France which was
confined to the educated classes, and which produced no sensible effect,
or at least a very gradual one, upon the people. All the nations of
Europe successively exhibited the same change. Milton alone introduced
more than six hundred words into the English language, almost all
derived from the Latin, the Greek, or the Hebrew. The constant agitation
which prevails in a democratic community tends unceasingly, on the
contrary, to change the character of the language, as it does the aspect
of affairs. In the midst of this general stir and competition of minds,
a great number of new ideas are formed, old ideas are lost, or reappear,
or are subdivided into an infinite variety of minor shades. The
consequence is, that many words must fall into desuetude, and others
must be brought into use.

Democratic nations love change for its own sake; and this is seen in
their language as much as in their politics. Even when they do not
need to change words, they sometimes feel a wish to transform them. The
genius of a democratic people is not only shown by the great number of
words they bring into use, but also by the nature of the ideas these new
words represent. Amongst such a people the majority lays down the law
in language as well as in everything else; its prevailing spirit is as
manifest in that as in other respects. But the majority is more engaged
in business than in study--in political and commercial interests than in
philosophical speculation or literary pursuits. Most of the words coined
or adopted for its use will therefore bear the mark of these habits;
they will mainly serve to express the wants of business, the passions of
party, or the details of the public administration. In these departments
the language will constantly spread, whilst on the other hand it will
gradually lose ground in metaphysics and theology.

As to the source from which democratic nations are wont to derive their
new expressions, and the manner in which they go to work to coin them,
both may easily be described. Men living in democratic countries know
but little of the language which was spoken at Athens and at Rome,
and they do not care to dive into the lore of antiquity to find the
expression they happen to want. If they have sometimes recourse to
learned etymologies, vanity will induce them to search at the roots of
the dead languages; but erudition does not naturally furnish them with
its resources. The most ignorant, it sometimes happens, will use them
most. The eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will
often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a Greek or
Latin name. The lower the calling is, and the more remote from learning,
the more pompous and erudite is its appellation. Thus the French
rope-dancers have transformed themselves into acrobates and funambules.

In the absence of knowledge of the dead languages, democratic
nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues; for their mutual
intercourse becomes perpetual, and the inhabitants of different
countries imitate each other the more readily as they grow more like
each other every day.

But it is principally upon their own languages that democratic nations
attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time to time they resume
forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or
they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar
to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language
of daily life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the
technical language of a profession or a party, are thus drawn into
general circulation.

The most common expedient employed by democratic nations to make an
innovation in language consists in giving some unwonted meaning to
an expression already in use. This method is very simple, prompt, and
convenient; no learning is required to use it aright, and ignorance
itself rather facilitates the practice; but that practice is most
dangerous to the language. When a democratic people doubles the meaning
of a word in this way, they sometimes render the signification which it
retains as ambiguous as that which it acquires. An author begins by a
slight deflection of a known expression from its primitive meaning, and
he adapts it, thus modified, as well as he can to his subject. A second
writer twists the sense of the expression in another way; a third takes
possession of it for another purpose; and as there is no common appeal
to the sentence of a permanent tribunal which may definitely settle the
signification of the word, it remains in an ambiguous condition. The
consequence is that writers hardly ever appear to dwell upon a single
thought, but they always seem to point their aim at a knot of ideas,
leaving the reader to judge which of them has been hit. This is a
deplorable consequence of democracy. I had rather that the language
should be made hideous with words imported from the Chinese, the
Tartars, or the Hurons, than that the meaning of a word in our own
language should become indeterminate. Harmony and uniformity are
only secondary beauties in composition; many of these things are
conventional, and, strictly speaking, it is possible to forego them; but
without clear phraseology there is no good language.

The principle of equality necessarily introduces several other changes
into language. In aristocratic ages, when each nation tends to stand
aloof from all others and likes to have distinct characteristics of its
own, it often happens that several peoples which have a common origin
become nevertheless estranged from each other, so that, without ceasing
to understand the same language, they no longer all speak it in the same
manner. In these ages each nation is divided into a certain number of
classes, which see but little of each other, and do not intermingle.
Each of these classes contracts, and invariably retains, habits of
mind peculiar to itself, and adopts by choice certain words and certain
terms, which afterwards pass from generation to generation, like their
estates. The same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a
language of the rich--a language of the citizen and a language of the
nobility--a learned language and a vulgar one. The deeper the divisions,
and the more impassable the barriers of society become, the more must
this be the case. I would lay a wager, that amongst the castes of India
there are amazing variations of language, and that there is almost
as much difference between the language of the pariah and that of the
Brahmin as there is in their dress. When, on the contrary, men, being no
longer restrained by ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse--when
castes are destroyed, and the classes of society are recruited and
intermixed with each other, all the words of a language are mingled.
Those which are unsuitable to the greater number perish; the remainder
form a common store, whence everyone chooses pretty nearly at random.
Almost all the different dialects which divided the idioms of European
nations are manifestly declining; there is no patois in the New World,
and it is disappearing every day from the old countries.

The influence of this revolution in social conditions is as much felt
in style as it is in phraseology. Not only does everyone use the same
words, but a habit springs up of using them without discrimination. The
rules which style had set up are almost abolished: the line ceases to
be drawn between expressions which seem by their very nature vulgar, and
other which appear to be refined. Persons springing from different ranks
of society carry the terms and expressions they are accustomed to use
with them, into whatever circumstances they may pass; thus the origin
of words is lost like the origin of individuals, and there is as much
confusion in language as there is in society.

I am aware that in the classification of words there are rules which do
not belong to one form of society any more than to another, but which
are derived from the nature of things. Some expressions and phrases
are vulgar, because the ideas they are meant to express are low in
themselves; others are of a higher character, because the objects they
are intended to designate are naturally elevated. No intermixture of
ranks will ever efface these differences. But the principle of equality
cannot fail to root out whatever is merely conventional and arbitrary
in the forms of thought. Perhaps the necessary classification which
I pointed out in the last sentence will always be less respected by a
democratic people than by any other, because amongst such a people
there are no men who are permanently disposed by education, culture, and
leisure to study the natural laws of language, and who cause those laws
to be respected by their own observance of them.

I shall not quit this topic without touching on a feature of democratic
languages, which is perhaps more characteristic of them than any other.
It has already been shown that democratic nations have a taste, and
sometimes a passion, for general ideas, and that this arises from their
peculiar merits and defects. This liking for general ideas is displayed
in democratic languages by the continual use of generic terms or
abstract expressions, and by the manner in which they are employed.
This is the great merit and the great imperfection of these languages.
Democratic nations are passionately addicted to generic terms or
abstract expressions, because these modes of speech enlarge thought,
and assist the operations of the mind by enabling it to include several
objects in a small compass. A French democratic writer will be apt
to say capacites in the abstract for men of capacity, and without
particularizing the objects to which their capacity is applied: he will
talk about actualities to designate in one word the things passing
before his eyes at the instant; and he will comprehend under the term
eventualities whatever may happen in the universe, dating from the moment
at which he speaks. Democratic writers are perpetually coining words of
this kind, in which they sublimate into further abstraction the abstract
terms of the language. Nay, more, to render their mode of speech more
succinct, they personify the subject of these abstract terms, and make
it act like a real entity. Thus they would say in French, "La force des
choses veut que les capacites gouvernent."

I cannot better illustrate what I mean than by my own example. I have
frequently used the word "equality" in an absolute sense--nay, I have
personified equality in several places; thus I have said that equality
does such and such things, or refrains from doing others. It may be
affirmed that the writers of the age of Louis XIV would not have used
these expressions: they would never have thought of using the word
"equality" without applying it to some particular object; and they would
rather have renounced the term altogether than have consented to make a
living personage of it.

These abstract terms which abound in democratic languages, and which are
used on every occasion without attaching them to any particular fact,
enlarge and obscure the thoughts they are intended to convey; they
render the mode of speech more succinct, and the idea contained in
it less clear. But with regard to language, democratic nations prefer
obscurity to labor. I know not indeed whether this loose style has not
some secret charm for those who speak and write amongst these nations.
As the men who live there are frequently left to the efforts of their
individual powers of mind, they are almost always a prey to doubt; and
as their situation in life is forever changing, they are never held fast
to any of their opinions by the certain tenure of their fortunes. Men
living in democratic countries are, then, apt to entertain unsettled
ideas, and they require loose expressions to convey them. As they never
know whether the idea they express to-day will be appropriate to the new
position they may occupy to-morrow, they naturally acquire a liking for
abstract terms. An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom: you
may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without
being observed.

Amongst all nations, generic and abstract terms form the basis of
language. I do not, therefore, affect to expel these terms from
democratic languages; I simply remark that men have an especial
tendency, in the ages of democracy, to multiply words of this kind--to
take them always by themselves in their most abstract acceptation, and
to use them on all occasions, even when the nature of the discourse does
not require them.




Chapter XVII: Of Some Of The Sources Of Poetry Amongst Democratic
Nations

Various different significations have been given to the word "poetry."
It would weary my readers if I were to lead them into a discussion as to
which of these definitions ought to be selected: I prefer telling them
at once that which I have chosen. In my opinion, poetry is the search
and the delineation of the ideal. The poet is he who, by suppressing a
part of what exists, by adding some imaginary touches to the picture,
and by combining certain real circumstances, but which do not in fact
concurrently happen, completes and extends the work of nature. Thus the
object of poetry is not to represent what is true, but to adorn it,
and to present to the mind some loftier imagery. Verse, regarded as the
ideal beauty of language, may be eminently poetical; but verse does not,
of itself, constitute poetry.

I now proceed to inquire whether, amongst the actions, the sentiments,
and the opinions of democratic nations, there are any which lead to a
conception of ideal beauty, and which may for this reason be
considered as natural sources of poetry. It must in the first place, be
acknowledged that the taste for ideal beauty, and the pleasure derived
from the expression of it, are never so intense or so diffused amongst a
democratic as amongst an aristocratic people. In aristocratic nations it
sometimes happens that the body goes on to act as it were spontaneously,
whilst the higher faculties are bound and burdened by repose. Amongst
these nations the people will very often display poetic tastes, and
sometimes allow their fancy to range beyond and above what surrounds
them. But in democracies the love of physical gratification, the notion
of bettering one's condition, the excitement of competition, the charm
of anticipated success, are so many spurs to urge men onwards in the
active professions they have embraced, without allowing them to deviate
for an instant from the track. The main stress of the faculties is to
this point. The imagination is not extinct; but its chief function is to
devise what may be useful, and to represent what is real.

The principle of equality not only diverts men from the description of
ideal beauty--it also diminishes the number of objects to be described.
Aristocracy, by maintaining society in a fixed position, is favorable
to the solidity and duration of positive religions, as well as to the
stability of political institutions. It not only keeps the human mind
within a certain sphere of belief, but it predisposes the mind to adopt
one faith rather than another. An aristocratic people will always be
prone to place intermediate powers between God and man. In this respect
it may be said that the aristocratic element is favorable to poetry.
When the universe is peopled with supernatural creatures, not palpable
to the senses but discovered by the mind, the imagination ranges
freely, and poets, finding a thousand subjects to delineate, also find
a countless audience to take an interest in their productions. In
democratic ages it sometimes happens, on the contrary, that men are as
much afloat in matters of belief as they are in their laws. Scepticism
then draws the imagination of poets back to earth, and confines them to
the real and visible world. Even when the principle of equality does
not disturb religious belief, it tends to simplify it, and to divert
attention from secondary agents, to fix it principally on the Supreme
Power. Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation
of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men
a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect
aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow
larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and for this twofold
reason they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.

After having deprived poetry of the past, the principle of equality
robs it in part of the present. Amongst aristocratic nations there are a
certain number of privileged personages, whose situation is, as it were,
without and above the condition of man; to these, power, wealth, fame,
wit, refinement, and distinction in all things appear peculiarly to
belong. The crowd never sees them very closely, or does not watch them
in minute details; and little is needed to make the description of such
men poetical. On the other hand, amongst the same people, you will meet
with classes so ignorant, low, and enslaved, that they are no less fit
objects for poetry from the excess of their rudeness and wretchedness,
than the former are from their greatness and refinement. Besides, as
the different classes of which an aristocratic community is composed
are widely separated, and imperfectly acquainted with each other, the
imagination may always represent them with some addition to, or some
subtraction from, what they really are. In democratic communities, where
men are all insignificant and very much alike, each man instantly sees
all his fellows when he surveys himself. The poets of democratic ages
can never, therefore, take any man in particular as the subject of a
piece; for an object of slender importance, which is distinctly seen
on all sides, will never lend itself to an ideal conception. Thus the
principle of equality; in proportion as it has established itself in
the world, has dried up most of the old springs of poetry. Let us now
attempt to show what new ones it may disclose.

When scepticism had depopulated heaven, and the progress of equality
had reduced each individual to smaller and better known proportions, the
poets, not yet aware of what they could substitute for the great themes
which were departing together with the aristocracy, turned their eyes
to inanimate nature. As they lost sight of gods and heroes, they set
themselves to describe streams and mountains. Thence originated in
the last century, that kind of poetry which has been called, by way
of distinction, the descriptive. Some have thought that this sort of
delineation, embellished with all the physical and inanimate objects
which cover the earth, was the kind of poetry peculiar to democratic
ages; but I believe this to be an error, and that it only belongs to a
period of transition.

I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from
all that is external to man, and fixes it on man alone. Democratic
nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the
productions of nature; but they are only excited in reality by a survey
of themselves. Here, and here alone, the true sources of poetry amongst
such nations are to be found; and it may be believed that the poets who
shall neglect to draw their inspirations hence, will lose all sway over
the minds which they would enchant, and will be left in the end with
none but unimpassioned spectators of their transports. I have shown how
the ideas of progression and of the indefinite perfectibility of the
human race belong to democratic ages. Democratic nations care but little
for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in
this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all
measure. Here then is the wildest range open to the genius of poets,
which allows them to remove their performances to a sufficient distance
from the eye. Democracy shuts the past against the poet, but opens
the future before him. As all the citizens who compose a democratic
community are nearly equal and alike, the poet cannot dwell upon any one
of them; but the nation itself invites the exercise of his powers. The
general similitude of individuals, which renders any one of them taken
separately an improper subject of poetry, allows poets to include them
all in the same imagery, and to take a general survey of the people
itself. Democractic nations have a clearer perception than any others of
their own aspect; and an aspect so imposing is admirably fitted to the
delineation of the ideal.

I readily admit that the Americans have no poets; I cannot allow that
they have no poetic ideas. In Europe people talk a great deal of the
wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them:
they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature, and they may be
said not to perceive the mighty forests which surround them till they
fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight: the
American people views its own march across these wilds--drying swamps,
turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.
This magnificent image of themselves does not meet the gaze of the
Americans at intervals only; it may be said to haunt every one of them
in his least as well as in his most important actions, and to be always
flitting before his mind. Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid,
so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the
life of a man in the United States. But amongst the thoughts which it
suggests there is always one which is full of poetry, and that is the
hidden nerve which gives vigor to the frame.

In aristocratic ages each people, as well as each individual, is prone
to stand separate and aloof from all others. In democratic ages, the
extreme fluctuations of men and the impatience of their desires keep
them perpetually on the move; so that the inhabitants of different
countries intermingle, see, listen to, and borrow from each other's
stores. It is not only then the members of the same community who grow
more alike; communities are themselves assimilated to one another,
and the whole assemblage presents to the eye of the spectator one vast
democracy, each citizen of which is a people. This displays the aspect
of mankind for the first time in the broadest light. All that belongs
to the existence of the human race taken as a whole, to its vicissitudes
and to its future, becomes an abundant mine of poetry. The poets who
lived in aristocratic ages have been eminently successful in their
delineations of certain incidents in the life of a people or a man;
but none of them ever ventured to include within his performances the
destinies of mankind--a task which poets writing in democratic ages may
attempt. At that same time at which every man, raising his eyes above
his country, begins at length to discern mankind at large, the Divinity
is more and more manifest to the human mind in full and entire majesty.
If in democratic ages faith in positive religions be often shaken, and
the belief in intermediate agents, by whatever name they are called, be
overcast; on the other hand men are disposed to conceive a far broader
idea of Providence itself, and its interference in human affairs assumes
a new and more imposing appearance to their eyes. Looking at the human
race as one great whole, they easily conceive that its destinies are
regulated by the same design; and in the actions of every individual
they are led to acknowledge a trace of that universal and eternal plan
on which God rules our race. This consideration may be taken as another
prolific source of poetry which is opened in democratic ages. Democratic
poets will always appear trivial and frigid if they seek to invest gods,
demons, or angels, with corporeal forms, and if they attempt to draw
them down from heaven to dispute the supremacy of earth. But if they
strive to connect the great events they commemorate with the general
providential designs which govern the universe, and, without showing the
finger of the Supreme Governor, reveal the thoughts of the Supreme Mind,
their works will be admired and understood, for the imagination of their
contemporaries takes this direction of its own accord.

It may be foreseen in the like manner that poets living in democratic
ages will prefer the delineation of passions and ideas to that of
persons and achievements. The language, the dress, and the daily actions
of men in democracies are repugnant to ideal conceptions. These things
are not poetical in themselves; and, if it were otherwise, they would
cease to be so, because they are too familiar to all those to whom the
poet would speak of them. This forces the poet constantly to search
below the external surface which is palpable to the senses, in order to
read the inner soul: and nothing lends itself more to the delineation
of the ideal than the scrutiny of the hidden depths in the immaterial
nature of man. I need not to ramble over earth and sky to discover
a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of greatness and littleness
infinite, of intense gloom and of amazing brightness--capable at once
of exciting pity, admiration, terror, contempt. I find that object in
myself. Man springs out of nothing, crosses time, and disappears forever
in the bosom of God; he is seen but for a moment, staggering on the
verge of the two abysses, and there he is lost. If man were wholly
ignorant of himself, he would have no poetry in him; for it is
impossible to describe what the mind does not conceive. If man clearly
discerned his own nature, his imagination would remain idle, and
would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is
sufficiently disclosed for him to apprehend something of himself; and
sufficiently obscure for all the rest to be plunged in thick darkness,
in which he gropes forever--and forever in vain--to lay hold on some
completer notion of his being.

Amongst a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legendary lays
or the memorials of old traditions. The poet will not attempt to people
the universe with supernatural beings in whom his readers and his own
fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he present virtues and vices
in the mask of frigid personification, which are better received under
their own features. All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and
the poet needs no more. The destinies of mankind--man himself, taken
aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence of
Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities,
and inconceivable wretchedness--will become the chief, if not the sole
theme of poetry amongst these nations. Experience may confirm this
assertion, if we consider the productions of the greatest poets who have
appeared since the world has been turned to democracy. The authors of
our age who have so admirably delineated the features of Faust, Childe
Harold, Rene, and Jocelyn, did not seek to record the actions of an
individual, but to enlarge and to throw light on some of the obscurer
recesses of the human heart. Such are the poems of democracy. The
principle of equality does not then destroy all the subjects of poetry:
it renders them less numerous, but more vast.




Chapter XVIII: Of The Inflated Style Of American Writers And Orators

I have frequently remarked that the Americans, who generally treat
of business in clear, plain language, devoid of all ornament, and so
extremely simple as to be often coarse, are apt to become inflated
as soon as they attempt a more poetical diction. They then vent their
pomposity from one end of a harangue to the other; and to hear them
lavish imagery on every occasion, one might fancy that they never spoke
of anything with simplicity. The English are more rarely given to a
similar failing. The cause of this may be pointed out without much
difficulty. In democratic communities each citizen is habitually engaged
in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely himself. If he ever
raises his looks higher, he then perceives nothing but the immense form
of society at large, or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. His
ideas are all either extremely minute and clear, or extremely general
and vague: what lies between is an open void. When he has been drawn out
of his own sphere, therefore, he always expects that some amazing object
will be offered to his attention; and it is on these terms alone that he
consents to tear himself for an instant from the petty complicated cares
which form the charm and the excitement of his life. This appears to me
sufficiently to explain why men in democracies, whose concerns are in
general so paltry, call upon their poets for conceptions so vast and
descriptions so unlimited.

The authors, on their part, do not fail to obey a propensity of which
they themselves partake; they perpetually inflate their imaginations,
and expanding them beyond all bounds, they not unfrequently abandon
the great in order to reach the gigantic. By these means they hope to
attract the observation of the multitude, and to fix it easily upon
themselves: nor are their hopes disappointed; for as the multitude
seeks for nothing in poetry but subjects of very vast dimensions, it
has neither the time to measure with accuracy the proportions of all the
subjects set before it, nor a taste sufficiently correct to perceive
at once in what respect they are out of proportion. The author and the
public at once vitiate one another.

We have just seen that amongst democratic nations, the sources of poetry
are grand, but not abundant. They are soon exhausted: and poets, not
finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon
them entirely and create monsters. I do not fear that the poetry of
democratic nations will prove too insipid, or that it will fly too near
the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in
the clouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions.
I fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged
with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and
strange creations; and that the fantastic beings of their brain may
sometimes make us regret the world of reality.




Chapter XIX: Some Observations On The Drama Amongst Democratic Nations

When the revolution which subverts the social and political state of an
aristocratic people begins to penetrate into literature, it generally
first manifests itself in the drama, and it always remains conspicuous
there. The spectator of a dramatic piece is, to a certain extent, taken
by surprise by the impression it conveys. He has no time to refer to his
memory, or to consult those more able to judge than himself. It does
not occur to him to resist the new literary tendencies which begin to
be felt by him; he yields to them before he knows what they are. Authors
are very prompt in discovering which way the taste of the public is thus
secretly inclined. They shape their productions accordingly; and the
literature of the stage, after having served to indicate the approaching
literary revolution, speedily completes its accomplishment. If you would
judge beforehand of the literature of a people which is lapsing into
democracy, study its dramatic productions.

The literature of the stage, moreover, even amongst aristocratic
nations, constitutes the most democratic part of their literature.
No kind of literary gratification is so much within the reach of the
multitude as that which is derived from theatrical representations.
Neither preparation nor study is required to enjoy them: they lay hold
on you in the midst of your prejudices and your ignorance. When the yet
untutored love of the pleasures of the mind begins to affect a class
of the community, it instantly draws them to the stage. The theatres
of aristocratic nations have always been filled with spectators not
belonging to the aristocracy. At the theatre alone the higher ranks mix
with the middle and the lower classes; there alone do the former consent
to listen to the opinion of the latter, or at least to allow them
to give an opinion at all. At the theatre, men of cultivation and of
literary attainments have always had more difficulty than elsewhere in
making their taste prevail over that of the people, and in preventing
themselves from being carried away by the latter. The pit has frequently
made laws for the boxes.

If it be difficult for an aristocracy to prevent the people from getting
the upper hand in the theatre, it will readily be understood that the
people will be supreme there when democratic principles have crept into
the laws and manners--when ranks are intermixed--when minds, as well as
fortunes, are brought more nearly together--and when the upper class
has lost, with its hereditary wealth, its power, its precedents, and its
leisure. The tastes and propensities natural to democratic nations, in
respect to literature, will therefore first be discernible in the drama,
and it may be foreseen that they will break out there with vehemence. In
written productions, the literary canons of aristocracy will be gently,
gradually, and, so to speak, legally modified; at the theatre they
will be riotously overthrown. The drama brings out most of the
good qualities, and almost all the defects, inherent in democratic
literature. Democratic peoples hold erudition very cheap, and care but
little for what occurred at Rome and Athens; they want to hear something
which concerns themselves, and the delineation of the present age is
what they demand.

When the heroes and the manners of antiquity are frequently brought
upon the stage, and dramatic authors faithfully observe the rules of
antiquated precedent, that is enough to warrant a conclusion that the
democratic classes have not yet got the upper hand of the theatres.
Racine makes a very humble apology in the preface to the "Britannicus"
for having disposed of Junia amongst the Vestals, who, according to
Aulus Gellius, he says, "admitted no one below six years of age nor
above ten." We may be sure that he would neither have accused himself
of the offence, nor defended himself from censure, if he had written for
our contemporaries. A fact of this kind not only illustrates the state
of literature at the time when it occurred, but also that of society
itself. A democratic stage does not prove that the nation is in a state
of democracy, for, as we have just seen, even in aristocracies it may
happen that democratic tastes affect the drama; but when the spirit
of aristocracy reigns exclusively on the stage, the fact irrefragably
demonstrates that the whole of society is aristocratic; and it may be
boldly inferred that the same lettered and learned class which sways the
dramatic writers commands the people and governs the country.

The refined tastes and the arrogant bearing of an aristocracy will
rarely fail to lead it, when it manages the stage, to make a kind of
selection in human nature. Some of the conditions of society claim
its chief interest; and the scenes which delineate their manners are
preferred upon the stage. Certain virtues, and even certain vices,
are thought more particularly to deserve to figure there; and they are
applauded whilst all others are excluded. Upon the stage, as well
as elsewhere, an aristocratic audience will only meet personages of
quality, and share the emotions of kings. The same thing applies to
style: an aristocracy is apt to impose upon dramatic authors certain
modes of expression which give the key in which everything is to be
delivered. By these means the stage frequently comes to delineate only
one side of man, or sometimes even to represent what is not to be met
with in human nature at all--to rise above nature and to go beyond it.

In democratic communities the spectators have no such partialities,
and they rarely display any such antipathies: they like to see upon the
stage that medley of conditions, of feelings, and of opinions, which
occurs before their eyes. The drama becomes more striking, more common,
and more true. Sometimes, however, those who write for the stage in
democracies also transgress the bounds of human nature--but it is on
a different side from their predecessors. By seeking to represent in
minute detail the little singularities of the moment and the peculiar
characteristics of certain personages, they forget to portray the
general features of the race.

When the democratic classes rule the stage, they introduce as much
license in the manner of treating subjects as in the choice of them.
As the love of the drama is, of all literary tastes, that which is most
natural to democratic nations, the number of authors and of spectators,
as well as of theatrical representations, is constantly increasing
amongst these communities. A multitude composed of elements so
different, and scattered in so many different places, cannot acknowledge
the same rules or submit to the same laws. No concurrence is possible
amongst judges so numerous, who know not when they may meet again; and
therefore each pronounces his own sentence on the piece. If the effect
of democracy is generally to question the authority of all literary
rules and conventions, on the stage it abolishes them altogether, and
puts in their place nothing but the whim of each author and of each
public.

The drama also displays in an especial manner the truth of what I have
said before in speaking more generally of style and art in democratic
literature. In reading the criticisms which were occasioned by the
dramatic productions of the age of Louis XIV, one is surprised to remark
the great stress which the public laid on the probability of the plot,
and the importance which was attached to the perfect consistency of
the characters, and to their doing nothing which could not be easily
explained and understood. The value which was set upon the forms of
language at that period, and the paltry strife about words with which
dramatic authors were assailed, are no less surprising. It would
seem that the men of the age of Louis XIV attached very exaggerated
importance to those details, which may be perceived in the study, but
which escape attention on the stage. For, after all, the principal
object of a dramatic piece is to be performed, and its chief merit is to
affect the audience. But the audience and the readers in that age were
the same: on quitting the theatre they called up the author for judgment
to their own firesides. In democracies, dramatic pieces are listened to,
but not read. Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do
not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, but the keen emotions of
the heart. They do not expect to hear a fine literary work, but to see
a play; and provided the author writes the language of his country
correctly enough to be understood, and that his characters excite
curiosity and awaken sympathy, the audience are satisfied. They ask no
more of fiction, and immediately return to real life. Accuracy of style
is therefore less required, because the attentive observance of its
rules is less perceptible on the stage. As for the probability of the
plot, it is incompatible with perpetual novelty, surprise, and rapidity
of invention. It is therefore neglected, and the public excuses the
neglect. You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience
into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by
what road you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for
having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.

The Americans very broadly display all the different propensities which
I have here described when they go to the theatres; but it must be
acknowledged that as yet a very small number of them go to theatres at
all. Although playgoers and plays have prodigiously increased in the
United States in the last forty years, the population indulges in this
kind of amusement with the greatest reserve. This is attributable to
peculiar causes, which the reader is already acquainted with, and of
which a few words will suffice to remind him. The Puritans who founded
the American republics were not only enemies to amusements, but they
professed an especial abhorrence for the stage. They considered it as
an abominable pastime; and as long as their principles prevailed with
undivided sway, scenic performances were wholly unknown amongst them.
These opinions of the first fathers of the colony have left very deep
marks on the minds of their descendants. The extreme regularity of
habits and the great strictness of manners which are observable in the
United States, have as yet opposed additional obstacles to the growth
of dramatic art. There are no dramatic subjects in a country which has
witnessed no great political catastrophes, and in which love invariably
leads by a straight and easy road to matrimony. People who spend every
day in the week in making money, and the Sunday in going to church, have
nothing to invite the muse of Comedy.

A single fact suffices to show that the stage is not very popular in the
United States. The Americans, whose laws allow of the utmost freedom
and even license of language in all other respects, have nevertheless
subjected their dramatic authors to a sort of censorship. Theatrical
performances can only take place by permission of the municipal
authorities. This may serve to show how much communities are like
individuals; they surrender themselves unscrupulously to their ruling
passions, and afterwards take the greatest care not to yield too much to
the vehemence of tastes which they do not possess.

No portion of literature is connected by closer or more numerous ties
with the present condition of society than the drama. The drama of one
period can never be suited to the following age, if in the interval an
important revolution has changed the manners and the laws of the nation.
The great authors of a preceding age may be read; but pieces written
for a different public will not be followed. The dramatic authors of the
past live only in books. The traditional taste of certain individuals,
vanity, fashion, or the genius of an actor may sustain or resuscitate
for a time the aristocratic drama amongst a democracy; but it will
speedily fall away of itself--not overthrown, but abandoned.




Chapter XX: Characteristics Of Historians In Democratic Ages

Historians who write in aristocratic ages are wont to refer all
occurrences to the particular will or temper of certain individuals; and
they are apt to attribute the most important revolutions to very
slight accidents. They trace out the smallest causes with sagacity,
and frequently leave the greatest unperceived. Historians who live in
democratic ages exhibit precisely opposite characteristics. Most of them
attribute hardly any influence to the individual over the destiny of the
race, nor to citizens over the fate of a people; but, on the other hand,
they assign great general causes to all petty incidents. These contrary
tendencies explain each other.

When the historian of aristocratic ages surveys the theatre of the
world, he at once perceives a very small number of prominent actors, who
manage the whole piece. These great personages, who occupy the front of
the stage, arrest the observation, and fix it on themselves; and whilst
the historian is bent on penetrating the secret motives which make them
speak and act, the rest escape his memory. The importance of the things
which some men are seen to do, gives him an exaggerated estimate of the
influence which one man may possess; and naturally leads him to think,
that in order to explain the impulses of the multitude, it is necessary
to refer them to the particular influence of some one individual.

When, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent of one another,
and each of them is individually weak, no one is seen to exert a great,
or still less a lasting power, over the community. At first sight,
individuals appear to be absolutely devoid of any influence over it;
and society would seem to advance alone by the free and voluntary
concurrence of all the men who compose it. This naturally prompts the
mind to search for that general reason which operates upon so many men's
faculties at the same time, and turns them simultaneously in the same
direction.

I am very well convinced that even amongst democratic nations, the
genius, the vices, or the virtues of certain individuals retard or
accelerate the natural current of a people's history: but causes of
this secondary and fortuitous nature are infinitely more various, more
concealed, more complex, less powerful, and consequently less easy to
trace in periods of equality than in ages of aristocracy, when the task
of the historian is simply to detach from the mass of general events the
particular influences of one man or of a few men. In the former case
the historian is soon wearied by the toil; his mind loses itself in this
labyrinth; and, in his inability clearly to discern or conspicuously to
point out the influence of individuals, he denies their existence.
He prefers talking about the characteristics of race, the physical
conformation of the country, or the genius of civilization, which
abridges his own labors, and satisfies his reader far better at less
cost.

M. de Lafayette says somewhere in his "Memoirs" that the exaggerated
system of general causes affords surprising consolations to second-rate
statesmen. I will add, that its effects are not less consolatory to
second-rate historians; it can always furnish a few mighty reasons
to extricate them from the most difficult part of their work, and it
indulges the indolence or incapacity of their minds, whilst it confers
upon them the honors of deep thinking.

For myself, I am of opinion that at all times one great portion of the
events of this world are attributable to general facts, and another to
special influences. These two kinds of cause are always in operation:
their proportion only varies. General facts serve to explain more things
in democratic than in aristocratic ages, and fewer things are then
assignable to special influences. At periods of aristocracy the
reverse takes place: special influences are stronger, general causes
weaker--unless indeed we consider as a general cause the fact itself of
the inequality of conditions, which allows some individuals to baffle
the natural tendencies of all the rest. The historians who seek to
describe what occurs in democratic societies are right, therefore, in
assigning much to general causes, and in devoting their chief attention
to discover them; but they are wrong in wholly denying the special
influence of individuals, because they cannot easily trace or follow it.

The historians who live in democratic ages are not only prone to assign
a great cause to every incident, but they are also given to connect
incidents together, so as to deduce a system from them. In aristocratic
ages, as the attention of historians is constantly drawn to individuals,
the connection of events escapes them; or rather, they do not believe
in any such connection. To them the clew of history seems every instant
crossed and broken by the step of man. In democratic ages, on the
contrary, as the historian sees much more of actions than of actors, he
may easily establish some kind of sequency and methodical order amongst
the former. Ancient literature, which is so rich in fine historical
compositions, does not contain a single great historical system, whilst
the poorest of modern literatures abound with them. It would appear
that the ancient historians did not make sufficient use of those general
theories which our historical writers are ever ready to carry to excess.

Those who write in democratic ages have another more dangerous tendency.
When the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often
happens that the world goes on to move, though the moving agent is no
longer discoverable. As it becomes extremely difficult to discern and
to analyze the reasons which, acting separately on the volition of each
member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the
old mass, men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary, and
that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them.
But even when the general fact which governs the private volition of all
individuals is supposed to be discovered upon the earth, the principle
of human free-will is not secure. A cause sufficiently extensive to
affect millions of men at once, and sufficiently strong to bend them all
together in the same direction, may well seem irresistible: having seen
that mankind do yield to it, the mind is close upon the inference that
mankind cannot resist it.

Historians who live in democratic ages, then, not only deny that the few
have any power of acting upon the destiny of a people, but they deprive
the people themselves of the power of modifying their own condition, and
they subject them either to an inflexible Providence, or to some blind
necessity. According to them, each nation is indissolubly bound by its
position, its origin, its precedents, and its character, to a certain
lot which no efforts can ever change. They involve generation in
generation, and thus, going back from age to age, and from necessity
to necessity, up to the origin of the world, they forge a close and
enormous chain, which girds and binds the human race. To their minds it
is not enough to show what events have occurred: they would fain show
that events could not have occurred otherwise. They take a nation
arrived at a certain stage of its history, and they affirm that it could
not but follow the track which brought it thither. It is easier to
make such an assertion than to show by what means the nation might have
adopted a better course.

In reading the historians of aristocratic ages, and especially those of
antiquity, it would seem that, to be master of his lot, and to govern
his fellow-creatures, man requires only to be master of himself. In
perusing the historical volumes which our age has produced, it would
seem that man is utterly powerless over himself and over all around him.
The historians of antiquity taught how to command: those of our time
teach only how to obey; in their writings the author often appears
great, but humanity is always diminutive. If this doctrine of necessity,
which is so attractive to those who write history in democratic ages,
passes from authors to their readers, till it infects the whole mass
of the community and gets possession of the public mind, it will soon
paralyze the activity of modern society, and reduce Christians to the
level of the Turks. I would moreover observe, that such principles
are peculiarly dangerous at the period at which we are arrived. Our
contemporaries are but too prone to doubt of the human free-will,
because each of them feels himself confined on every side by his own
weakness; but they are still willing to acknowledge the strength and
independence of men united in society. Let not this principle be lost
sight of; for the great object in our time is to raise the faculties of
men, not to complete their prostration.




Chapter XXI: Of Parliamentary Eloquence In The United States

Amongst aristocratic nations all the members of the community are
connected with and dependent upon each other; the graduated scale of
different ranks acts as a tie, which keeps everyone in his proper place
and the whole body in subordination. Something of the same kind always
occurs in the political assemblies of these nations. Parties naturally
range themselves under certain leaders, whom they obey by a sort of
instinct, which is only the result of habits contracted elsewhere. They
carry the manners of general society into the lesser assemblage.

In democratic countries it often happens that a great number of citizens
are tending to the same point; but each one only moves thither, or at
least flatters himself that he moves, of his own accord. Accustomed to
regulate his doings by personal impulse alone, he does not willingly
submit to dictation from without. This taste and habit of independence
accompany him into the councils of the nation. If he consents to connect
himself with other men in the prosecution of the same purpose, at least
he chooses to remain free to contribute to the common success after his
own fashion. Hence it is that in democratic countries parties are so
impatient of control, and are never manageable except in moments of
great public danger. Even then, the authority of leaders, which under
such circumstances may be able to make men act or speak, hardly ever
reaches the extent of making them keep silence.

Amongst aristocratic nations the members of political assemblies are
at the same time members of the aristocracy. Each of them enjoys high
established rank in his own right, and the position which he occupies
in the assembly is often less important in his eyes than that which
he fills in the country. This consoles him for playing no part in
the discussion of public affairs, and restrains him from too eagerly
attempting to play an insignificant one.

In America, it generally happens that a Representative only becomes
somebody from his position in the Assembly. He is therefore perpetually
haunted by a craving to acquire importance there, and he feels a
petulant desire to be constantly obtruding his opinions upon the House.
His own vanity is not the only stimulant which urges him on in this
course, but that of his constituents, and the continual necessity
of propitiating them. Amongst aristocratic nations a member of the
legislature is rarely in strict dependence upon his constituents: he is
frequently to them a sort of unavoidable representative; sometimes they
are themselves strictly dependent upon him; and if at length they reject
him, he may easily get elected elsewhere, or, retiring from public life,
he may still enjoy the pleasures of splendid idleness. In a democratic
country like the United States a Representative has hardly ever
a lasting hold on the minds of his constituents. However small an
electoral body may be, the fluctuations of democracy are constantly
changing its aspect; it must, therefore, be courted unceasingly. He
is never sure of his supporters, and, if they forsake him, he is
left without a resource; for his natural position is not sufficiently
elevated for him to be easily known to those not close to him; and,
with the complete state of independence prevailing among the people, he
cannot hope that his friends or the government will send him down to be
returned by an electoral body unacquainted with him. The seeds of his
fortune are, therefore, sown in his own neighborhood; from that nook of
earth he must start, to raise himself to the command of a people and
to influence the destinies of the world. Thus it is natural that in
democratic countries the members of political assemblies think more of
their constituents than of their party, whilst in aristocracies they
think more of their party than of their constituents.

But what ought to be said to gratify constituents is not always what
ought to be said in order to serve the party to which Representatives
profess to belong. The general interest of a party frequently demands
that members belonging to it should not speak on great questions which
they understand imperfectly; that they should speak but little on those
minor questions which impede the great ones; lastly, and for the most
part, that they should not speak at all. To keep silence is the
most useful service that an indifferent spokesman can render to the
commonwealth. Constituents, however, do not think so. The population of
a district sends a representative to take a part in the government of
a country, because they entertain a very lofty notion of his merits.
As men appear greater in proportion to the littleness of the objects
by which they are surrounded, it may be assumed that the opinion
entertained of the delegate will be so much the higher as talents are
more rare among his constituents. It will therefore frequently happen
that the less constituents have to expect from their representative, the
more they will anticipate from him; and, however incompetent he may be,
they will not fail to call upon him for signal exertions, corresponding
to the rank they have conferred upon him.

Independently of his position as a legislator of the State, electors
also regard their Representative as the natural patron of the
constituency in the Legislature; they almost consider him as the proxy
of each of his supporters, and they flatter themselves that he will not
be less zealous in defense of their private interests than of those
of the country. Thus electors are well assured beforehand that the
Representative of their choice will be an orator; that he will speak
often if he can, and that in case he is forced to refrain, he will
strive at any rate to compress into his less frequent orations an
inquiry into all the great questions of state, combined with a statement
of all the petty grievances they have themselves to complain to; so
that, though he be not able to come forward frequently, he should on
each occasion prove what he is capable of doing; and that, instead of
perpetually lavishing his powers, he should occasionally condense them
in a small compass, so as to furnish a sort of complete and brilliant
epitome of his constituents and of himself. On these terms they will
vote for him at the next election. These conditions drive worthy men of
humble abilities to despair, who, knowing their own powers, would never
voluntarily have come forward. But thus urged on, the Representative
begins to speak, to the great alarm of his friends; and rushing
imprudently into the midst of the most celebrated orators, he perplexes
the debate and wearies the House.

All laws which tend to make the Representative more dependent on the
elector, not only affect the conduct of the legislators, as I
have remarked elsewhere, but also their language. They exercise a
simultaneous influence on affairs themselves, and on the manner in which
affairs are discussed.

There is hardly a member of Congress who can make up his mind to go home
without having despatched at least one speech to his constituents;
nor who will endure any interruption until he has introduced into
his harangue whatever useful suggestions may be made touching the
four-and-twenty States of which the Union is composed, and especially
the district which he represents. He therefore presents to the mind of
his auditors a succession of great general truths (which he himself only
comprehends, and expresses, confusedly), and of petty minutia, which he
is but too able to discover and to point out. The consequence is that
the debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed,
and that they seem rather to drag their slow length along than to
advance towards a distinct object. Some such state of things will, I
believe, always arise in the public assemblies of democracies.

Propitious circumstances and good laws might succeed in drawing to the
legislature of a democratic people men very superior to those who are
returned by the Americans to Congress; but nothing will ever prevent the
men of slender abilities who sit there from obtruding themselves with
complacency, and in all ways, upon the public. The evil does not appear
to me to be susceptible of entire cure, because it not only originates
in the tactics of that assembly, but in its constitution and in that
of the country. The inhabitants of the United States seem themselves to
consider the matter in this light; and they show their long experience
of parliamentary life not by abstaining from making bad speeches, but by
courageously submitting to hear them made. They are 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/816