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 amongst 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 neighbors' 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.