DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.
SECOND PART.
FIRST BOOK.
INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE PROGRESS OF OPINION 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 haing taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical method, they are in possession of one, common to the whole people.
To evade the bondage of system and habit, of family-maxims, class-opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise and doing better; to seek the reason of things for oneself, and in oneself alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to aim at the substance through the form;—such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans.
