t, would
become so favorable as to admit of its great and sudden advancement.
One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to
reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense
of logic. Thus there have ever been, and will ever be, men who, after
having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle
of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith
from its influence, and to keep their minds floating at random between
liberty and obedience. But I am inclined to believe that the number of
these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other ages; and that
our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two
parts--some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to
the bosom of the Church of Rome.

Chapter VII: Of The Cause Of A Leaning To Pantheism Amongst Democratic
Nations

I shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the
preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general ideas
manifests itself in politics; but I would point out, at the present
stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. It cannot be
denied that pantheism has made great progress in our age. The writings
of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it: the Germans introduce it
into philosophy, and the French into literature. Most of the works of
imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge
caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to
such doctrines in their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed
from an accidental, but from a permanent cause.

When the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and each
individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more
insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to
consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only
of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude
of different objects at once; and it constantly strives to succeed in
connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea
of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so
universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields
himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with
the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator;
still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to