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