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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 among 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 neighbour's 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.
