from my words and
manner will enable you to find me out, and will guide your treatment
of me to-night. But if I in no unfriendly spirit--in a spirit, indeed,
the reverse of unfriendly--venture to repeat before you what this
great historian and analyst of democratic institutions said of
America, I am persuaded that you will hear me out. He wrote some three
and twenty years ago, and, perhaps, would not write the same to-day;
but it will do nobody any harm to have his words repeated, and, if
necessary, laid to heart.

In a work published in 1850, De Tocqueville says: 'It must be
confessed that, among the civilized peoples of our age, there are few
in which the highest sciences have made so little progress as in the
United States.'[27] He declares his conviction that, had you been
alone in the universe, you would soon have discovered that you cannot
long make progress in practical science without cultivating theoretic
science at the same time. But, according to De Tocqueville, you are
not thus alone. He refuses to separate America from its ancestral
home; and it is there, he contends, that you collect the treasures of
the intellect, without taking the trouble to create them.

De Tocqueville evidently doubts the capacity of a democracy to foster
genius as it was fostered in the ancient aristocracies. 'The future,'
he says, 'will prove whether the passion for profound knowledge, so
rare and so fruitful, can be born and developed as readily in
democratic societies as in aristocracies. For my part,' he continues,
'I can hardly believe it.' He speaks of the unquiet feverishness of
democratic communities, not in times of great excitement, for such
times may give an extraordinary impetus to ideas, but in times of
peace. There is then, he says, 'a small and uncomfortable agitation, a
sort of incessant attrition of man against man, which troubles and
distracts the mind without imparting to it either loftiness or
animation.' It rests with you to prove whether these things are
necessarily so--whether scientific genius cannot find, in the midst of
you, a tranquil home.

I should be loth to gainsay so keen an observer and so profound a
political writer, but, since my arrival in this country, I have been
unable to see anything in the constitution of society, to prevent a
student, with the root of the matter in him, from bestowing the most
steadfast devotion on pure science. If great scientific results are
not achieved in America, it