uch more addicted to the use of general ideas than
the English, and entertain a much greater relish for them: this appears
very singular at first sight, when it is remembered that the two nations
have the same origin, that they lived for centuries under the same laws,
and that they still incessantly interchange their opinions and their
manners. This contrast becomes much more striking still, if we fix our
eyes on our own part of the world, and compare together the two most
enlightened nations which inhabit it. It would seem as if the mind of
the English could only tear itself reluctantly and painfully away from
the observation of particular facts, to rise from them to their causes;
and that it only generalizes in spite of itself. Amongst the French, on
the contrary, the taste for general ideas would seem to have grown to
so ardent a passion, that it must be satisfied on every occasion. I am
informed, every morning when I wake, that some general and eternal law
has just been discovered, which I never heard mentioned before. There is
not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at discovering truths
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