mind employed, but also by contact with one's fellows in the business of life."[1]
Notwithstanding De Tocqueville's decided views as to the necessity of exercising individual energy and self-dependence, no one could be more ready than he was to recognize the value of that help and support for which all men are indebted to others in a greater or less degree. Thus, he often acknowledged, with gratitude, his obligations to his friends De Kergorlay and Stofells,—to the former for intellectual assistance, and to the latter for moral support and sympathy. To De Kergorlay he wrote—"Thine is the only soul in which I have confidence, and whose influence exercises a genuine effect upon my own. Many others have influence upon the details of my actions, but no one has so much influence as thou on the origination of fundamental ideas, and of those principles which are the rule of conduct." De Tocqueville was not less ready to confess the great obligations which he owed to his wife, Marie, for the preservation of that temper and frame of mind which enabled. him to prosecute his studies with success. He believed that a noble-minded woman insensibly elevated the character of her husband, while one of a grovelling nature as certainly tended to degrade it.[2]
- ↑ Œuvres et Correspondance inédite d'Alexis de Tocqueville. Par Gustave de Beaumont.' I. 398.
- ↑ "I have seen," said he, "a hundred times in the course of my life, a weak man exhibit genuine public virtue, because supported by a wife who sustained him in his course, not so much by advising him to such and such acts, as by exercising a strengthening influence over the manner in which duty or even ambition was to be regarded. Much oftener, however, it must be confessed, have I seen private and domestic life gradually transform
