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CHAPTER II.
OF INDIVIDUALISM[1] IN DEMOCRATIC COUNTRIES.
I have shown how it is that in ages of equality every man seeks
for his opinions within himself: I am now about to show how it is
that, in the same ages, all his feelings are turned toward himself
alone. Individualism is a novel expression to which a novel idea
has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism.
Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads
a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer
himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and
calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to
sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures, and to draw
apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus
formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at
large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism
proceeds from erroneous judgement more than from depraved
feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the
perversity of the heart.
Egotism blights the germ of all virtue: individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions.
- ↑ [I adopt the expression of the original, however strange it may seem to the English ear, partly because it illustrates the remark on the introduction of general terms into democratic language which was made in a preceding chapter, and partly because I know of no English word exactly equivalent to the expression. The chapter itself defines the meaning attached to it by the author.—Translator's Note.]
