Tocqueville Final 2

I know that all these different elements exist and are powerful, but the theme of this book does not deal with them. I have not undertaken to account for all our inclinations and all out ideas, but only with to demonstrate how equality has modified both.

As I am firmly convinced that the democratic revolution occurring before our eyes is an irresistable fact and that it would be neither desirable nor wise to try to combat it, it may seem surprising that this book expresses such severe criticisms of the democratic societies created by this revolution.

My answer is simply that, being no enemy of democracy, I want to treat it with sincereity

Enemies never tell men the truth, and it is seldom that their friends do so. That is why I have done so.

It seems to me that many people are ready to advertise the new benefits which democracy promises to mankind, but that few are prepared to point out the distant perils with which it threatens them.

So my attention has been directed principally against these dangers, and thinking that I have seen them clearly, I have not played the coward and kept silent.

I hope that the impartiality for which my first book was credited…

will be found again in this work

To carry the argument further and to select the chief among these various features, and the one which includes almost all the others within itself, I should say that in most mental operations each American relies on individual effort and judgement.

So, of all countries in the world, America is the one in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed. No one should be surprised at that.

The Americans never read Descartes’ work because their state of society distracts them from speculative inquiries

and they follow his precepts because this same state of society naturally leads them to adopt them

Men living in such a soicety cannot base beliefs on the opinions of the class to which they belong, for, one may almost say…

there are no more classes, and such as do still exist are composed of such changing elements that they can never, as a body, exercise real power over their members

So each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world

this american way of relying on themselves along to control their judgement leads to other mental habits

seeing that they are successful in resolving unaided all the little difficulties they encounter in practical affairs they are easily led to the conclusion that everything in the world can be explained and that nothing passes beyonf the limits of intelligence

thus they are ready to deny anything which they cannot understand. hence they have little faith in anything extraordinary and an almost invincibly distaste for the supernatural

let us turn our attention for a momen to the chronological development. The 16th century reformers subjected some of the dogma of the ancient faith to individual readong, but they still refused to allow all the others to be discussed by it.

In the 17th century Bacon in natural sceince and Descartes in the philosophy strictly so called, abolished accepted formulas, destroyed the dominion of tradition, and upset the authority of masters

The 18th century philopher turned this same principle into a general rule and undertook to submit the object of all his beliefs to each man’s individual examination

it is surely clear that Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire all used the same method, and they differed only in the greater or less extent to which they held it should be applied

It follows that the 18th philosophic method is not just French but democratic and that explains its easy admision throughout Europe, which has been so greatly changed partly be its means.

The reason teh French turned the world upside down is not simply that they changed their ancient beliefs and modificed their ancient morality. The reason is that they were th efirst to generalize and call attention to a philosophic method by which all ancient things could be attacked and the way opened for everything new.

If I am asked why nowadays that method is more often and more stricly applied by the French than by the Americans, through libtery is as complete and of longer date among the latter, I reply that that is partly due to two circumstances that must first by understood.

It was religion that gave birth to the English colonies in America. One must never forget that. In the US religion is mingled with all the national customs and all those feeligns which the word fatherland evokes. Fro that reason it has peculiar power.

These is another circumstance equally potent in its influence. In America religion has, if one may put it so, defined its own limits. There the structure of religious life has remained entirely distinct from the political organization. It has therefore been easy to change ancient laws without shaking the foundations of ancient beliefs.

In this way Christianity has kept a strong hold over the minds of Americans, and - this is the point I wish to emphasize - its power is not just that of a philosophy which has been examined and accepted, but that of a religion believed in without discussion.

Consequently each man undertakes to be sufficient to himself and glories in the fact that his beliefs about everything are peculiar to himself.

No longer do ideas, but interests only, form the links between men, and it would seem that human opinions were no more than a sort of mental dust open to te wind on every side and unable to come together and take shape.

No philospher in the world, however great, can help believing a million things on trust from others or assuming the truth of many things besides those he has power.

It is true that any man accepting any opinion on trust from another puts his mind in bondage. But it is a salutary bondage, which allows him to make good use of freedom.

So somwhere and somehow authority is always bound to play a part in intellectual and moreal life.

Therefore we need not inquire about the existence of intellectual authority in democratic ages, but only where it resides and what its limits are.

The last chapter showed how standards of equality give men a sort of instictive incredulity about he supernatural..

and a very high and often thoroughly exaggerated conception of human reason

So in democracies public opinion has a stranger power of which aristocratic nations can form no concpetion.

It uses no persuasion to forwards its beliefs, but by some mightly pressure of the mind of all upon the intelligence of each it imposes its ideas and makes them penetrate men’s very souls.

I anticipate that it may easily become too great and that possibly it will confince the activity of private judgement within limits too narrow for the dignity and happiness of mankind…

I see clearly two tendences in equality

one turn's each man’s attention to new thoughts,

while the other would induce him freely to give up thinking at all

If democratic peoples substitued the absolute power of a majority for all the various powers that used excessively to impede or hold back the upsurge of individual thought, the evil itself would only have changed its form

For myself, if I feel the hand of power heavy on my brow, I am little concerned to know who it is that oppresses me; I am no better inclined to pass my head under the yoke because a million men hold it for me

The diety does not view the human race collectivelty. With one galnce he sees every human being separately and sees in each the resemblances that makes him like his fellows and the differences which isolate him from them.

It follows that God has no need of general ideas, that is to say, He never feels the necessity of giving the same label to a considerable number of analoguous objects in order to think about them more conveniently

It is not like that with man. If a human intelligence tried to examine and judge all the particular cases that came his way individually he would soon be lost in a wilderness of detail and not be able ot seeee anything at all. In this pass he has recourse to an imperfect though necessary procedure which aids the weakness that makes it necessary.

After a superficial inspectoin of a certain number of objects he notes that they resemble each other and gives them all the same name. After that he puts them on one side and continues on his way.

General ideas do not beat witness to the power of human intelligence but rather to its inadequacy, for there are no beings exactly alike in nautre, no identical facts, no laws whicih can be applied indisciminately in teh sme way to several objects at once.

General ideas have this excellent quality that they permit human minds to pass judgement quickly on a great number of things; but the conceptsions they convey are always incomplete, and what is gained in extent is always lost to exactitute

Members, therefore, of artistocratic societties never make grand generalizations about themselves, and that is enough to give them a habitual distrust and unconscious distaste for all generalizations

Contrariwise, the democratic citizen sees notihng but people more or less like himself around him, and so he cannot think about one branch of mankind without widening his view until it includes the whole

the views of the ancient world about slaves clearly demonstrates the truth of this proposition

moreoever, there is every indication that those of the ancients who has been slaves before they became free, several of whom wrote fine books which have been preserved, saw slavery in the same light

All the great writers of antiquity were either members of the aristocracy of masters or, at the least, saw the artistocracy in undisputed possesion before their eyes. Their minds roamed free in many directions but were blinkered there.

Jesus Christ has to come down to earth to make all members of the human race understand that they were naturally similar and equal

Merchants eagerly grasp all philosophic generalizations presetned ot them without looking closely into them, and the same is true about politics, science, and the arts. But only after examination will they accept those concerning trade, and even then they do so with reserve

Statesmen behave just the same when it comes to political generalizations. If, then, there is a subject concerning which a democracy is particuarly liable to commit itself blindly and extravegantely to genral ideas, the best possibly corrective is to make the citizens pay daily, practical attention to it

Fixed ideas about God and human naturea are indispensable to men for the conduct of daily life, and it is daily life that prevents them from aquiring them.

The difficulty seems unparalleled. Among the scineces some are useful to the crows are also within its capacities; others can be mastered only by the few and are not cultivated by the majority, who needs nothing beyond their more remote applications. B

But the sciences in question are essential to the daily life of all though their study is out of reach of most

General ideas respecting God and Human nature are therefore the ideas above all others which ought to be withdrawn from the habitual action of private judgement and in which there is most to gain and least to lose by recognizing an authority

This is especially true of men living in free countries. When a people’s religion is destroyed doubt invades the highest faculties of the mind and half paralyzes all of the rest.

Each man gets into the way of having nothing but confused and changing notions about the matters of greatest importance to himself and his fellows. Opinions are ill-defended or abandonded, and in despair of solving unaided the greatest problems of humanity destiny, men ignobly give up thinking about them

Such a state inevitably enervates the soul and relaxing the springs of the will, prepares a people for bondage

then now only will they let their freedom be taken from them, but often they actually hand it over themselves

when there is no authority in religion or in politics, men are soon frightened by the limitless independence with which thhey are faced.

They are worried and worn out by the constant restlessness of everything. With everyting on the move in the realm of the mind, they want the material order at least to be firm and stable, and as they cannot accept their ancient beliefs again, they hand themselves over to a master

For my part, I doubt whether man can support complete religious independence and entire political liberty at the same time. I am lead to think that if he has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe.

The great usefulnesss of religions is even more apparent among egalitarian peoples than elsewhere

One must admit that equality while it brings great benefits to mankind opens the door, as I hope to show later

to very dangerous instincts. It tends to isolate men from each other to that each things only of himself

If ony finds a philopsphical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense being who along remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux…

and transformation of all that composes him, ony may be sure that Allsuch a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just democracies.

All their habits of mind prepare them to conceive it and put them on the way toward adopting it.

It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds.

Of all the different philosophical systems used to explain the universe, I believe that pantheism is one of those most fitted to seduce the mind in democratic ages.

All those who still appreciate the true nature of man’s greatness should combine in the struggle against it.

Though man resembles the animals in many respects, one characteristic is peculiar to him alone: he improves himself and they do not.

Mankind could not fail to discover this diference from the beginning. So the idea of perfectibility is as old as the world; equality had no share in bringing it to birth, but it has given it a new character.

But when castes disappear and classes are brought together, when men are jumbled together and habits, customs, and laws, are changin, when new facts impinge and new truths are discovered…

when old conceptions vanish and new ones take their place, then the human mind imagines the possibility of an ideal but laways fugitive perfection.

Historians who write in aristocratic ages generally attribute everything that happens to the will and character of particular men, and they will unhesitantly suppose slight accidents to be the cause of the greatest revolutions.

With great sagacity they trace the smallest causes and often leave the greatest unnoticed. Historians who live in democratic ages show contrary tendences.

Most of them attribute hardly any influence over the destinies of manking ot individuals, or over the fate of a people to the citizens

But they make great general causes responsible for the smallest particular events.

Not content to show how events have occurred they pride themselves on proving that they could not have happened differently. They see a ntaion which has reached a certain point in its history, and they aassert that it was bound to have followed the path that led it there. That is easier than demonstrating how it might have taken a better road

In reading historians of aristocratic ages, those of antiquity in particular, it would seem that in order to be master of his fate and to govern his fellows a man need only to be a master of himself

Perusing the histories written nowadays one would suppose that man had no power, neither over himself, nor over his surroundings.

Classical historians taught how to command; those of our own time teach next to nothing but how to obey. In their writings the author often figures large, but humanity is always tiny.

If this doctrine of fatality, so attractive to those who write history in democratic periods, passes from authors tor eaders, infects the whol mass of te commuinty, and tkaes possession of the public mind, it will soon paralyze the activities of modern society and bring christians down to the level of turks.

I woul add that usch a doctrien is particularly dangerous at the present moment. Our contemporaries are all too much inclided to doubts about free will, since each of them feels himself confined on every side of his own weekness.

But they will freely admit the strength and independence of men united in a body social

It is important not to let this idea grow dim, for we need to raise men’s souls, not to complete their prostration.

The task is no longer to preserve the particular advatnges which inequality of conditions had procurred for men, but to secrue those new benefits which equality may supply. We should not strive to be like our father but should try to attain that form of greatness and of happiness which is proper to ourselves.

for myself, looking back now from the extreme end of my task and seeing at a distance but collected together, all the various things which had attracked my close attention upon my way, I am full of fears and hopes.

I see great dangers which may be warded off and might evils may be avoided or kept in check; and I am ever increasingly confirmed in my belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and propserous, it is enough if they will to be so.

I am aware that many of my contemporaies think that nations on earth are never their own masters and that they are bound to obey some insuperable and unthinking power, the product of preexisting facts, of race, or soil, or climate.

These are false and cowardly doctrines which can only produce feeble men and pusillanimous nations. Providnece did not make mankind entirely free or completely enslaved.

Providence has in truth drawn a predestined circle around each man beyong which he cannot pass but within those vast limits man is strong and free, and so are peoples.

The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst.

But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to survitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness.

I have sought to expose the perils with equality threatens human freedom because I firmly believe that those dangers are both the most formidable and the least foreseen of those which the future has in store.

But I do not think that they are insurmountable.

We should lay down extensive but clear and fixed limits to the field of social power. Private people should be given certain rights and the undisputed enjoyment of such rights. The individual should be allowed to keep the little freedom, strength, and originality left to him.

His position in face of society should be raised and supported. Such, I think, should be the chief aim of any legislator in the age opening before us.

It would seem the sovereigns now only seek to do great things with men. I wish that they would try a little more to make men great, that they shuold attach less importance to the work and more to the workman…

that they should constantly remember that a nation cannot long remain great if each man is individual weak, and that no one has yet devised a form of society or a political combination which can make a people energetic when it is composed of citizens are flabby and feeble. I t

I think that at all times I should have loved freedom, but in the times in which we live, I am disposed to worship it.

On the other hand, I am convinced that in the age now opening before us those who try to base authority on priviledge and aristocracy will fail.

It really is difficult to imagine how poeple who have entirely given up managing their own affairs could make a wise choice of those who are ti di that for them.

One should never expect a liberal energetic, and wise government to originate in the votes of a people of servants

A great many people nowadays very easily fall in with this brand of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people.

That is not good enough for me. I am much less interested in the question who my master is than in the fact of obedience.

Our contemporaries are a prey to two conflicting passions: they feel the need of guidance, and they long to stay free.

Their imagination conceives a government which is unitary, protective, and all-powerful, but elected by the people. Centralization is combined with the sovereignty of the poeple

Having thus taken each citizen in turn in its powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government than extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperant cannot force their head above the crowd.

It does not break men’s will but softens bends and guides it it seldom enjoins but often inhibits action it does not destroy anything but prevents much being born it is not at all tyrannical but it hinders retrains enervants stifles and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking arnimals with the government as its shepherd

Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is along responsible for securing their enjoyment and wathing over their fate

It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directions their industry, makes rules for their testamnents, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?

Mankind for him consists in his children and personal friends. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are near enough but he does not notice them

He touches them but feels nothing. He exists in and for himself, and though he stull may have a family, one can at least say that he has not got a fatherland.

Taking into considerations the trivial nature of men’s passions now, the softeness of their mores, the extend of their education, the purity of their religion their steady habits of patient work and the restraint which they all show in the indulgence of both their vices and their virtues I do not expect their leaders to be tyrants but rather schoolmasters

Thus I think that the type of oppression which threatens democracies is different from anything there has never been in the world before. Our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I have myself vainly searched for a word which will exactly will exactly express the whole of the concpetion I have formed.

I asser that there is no country in Europe in which public administration has not become not only more centralized but also more inquisitive and minute.

Everywhere it meddles more than of old in private affairs. It controls in its own fashion more actin and more of their details, and ever increasingly takes its place beside and above the individual helping advising and constraining him

The sovereigns power having spread as we have seen over the entire sphere of previously existing authorities is not satisfied with that but goes on to extent in every direction over the domain heretofore reserved for personal independence

A multitude of actions which formerly were entirely free from the control of society are now subject thereto and this is constantly increasing

In most countries now education as well as charity has become a national concern. The state recieves, and often takes, the children from its mother’s arms to hand it over to its functionaries; it takes the responsibility for forming the feelings and shaping the ideas of each generation

Uniformity prevails in schoolwork as in everything else; diversity as well as freedom is daily vanishing

Refelcting on what has already been said, one is both startled and alarmed to see how everything in Europe seems to tend towards the indefinite extension of the prerogatives of the central power and to make the status of the individual weaker, more subordinate, and more precarious

The democratic nations of Europe share all the general and permanent tendencies which are leading the Americans toward the centralization of power, and they are also influenced by a great many secondary and accidental causes which do not apply in America. Each step they take toward equaltiy seems to bring them nearer to despotism

The chief and, in a sense, the only condition necessary in order to succeed in centralizing the surpreme power in a democratic society is to love equality or to make believe that you do so.

Thus the art of despotism once so complicated has been simplified; one may almost say that it has been reduced to a single principle

Men who live in times of equality naturall love the central power and willingly extend its prerogatives.

But if it happens that this power faithfully represents their interests and is an exact mirror of their instincts, there is hardly any limit to the confidence that will repose in it, for they feel that everything they give it is given to themselves.

I think that extreme centralization of political power ultimately enervates society and thus, in the end, weakens the government too.

But I do not deny that with the power of soicety thus centralized, great undertakings can be carried through at a given time and for a specific purpose

That is especially true in war, in which success depends much more on the capacity all one’s power

to bear quickly at a given point than on the actual extent of one’s resources

I think that in the dawning centuries of democracy

individual independence and local liberties will always be the products of art. Centralized government will be the natural thing

Every central power which follows its natural instincts loves equality and favors it.

For equality singularly facilitares, extends, and secures its influence.O

One can also assert that every central government worships uniformity; uniformity saves it the troble of inquiring into infinite details, which would be necessary if the rules were made to suit men instead of subjecting all men indiscriminately ot the same rule.

The government’s faults are forgiven for the sake of its tastes, only with reluctance is public confidence withdrawn, whatever its excesses or mistakes, and it is restored at the first call. Democratic people often hate those in whose hands the central power is vested, but they often love that power itself.

I am certainly not the one to say that such inclinations are invincible, for my chief aim in writing this book is to combat them.

I am only asserting that in our time a secret force constantly fosters them in the human heart, and if they are simply left unchecked they will fill it all

The inhabitatns of democracies having neither superiors or inferiors nor habitual and necessary partners readily fall back upon themselves and think of themselves in isolation. I went into that matter at length when discussing individualism.

It is therefore always an effort for such men to tear themselves away from their private affairs and pay attention to those of the community; the natural inclination is to leave the only visible and permanent representative of collective interests, that is to say, the state, to look after them

Our contemporaries therefore are much less divided than is commonly supposed. They do argue constantly about what should have sovereign power, but they readily agree about the duties and rights of that power.

They all think of the government as a sole simply providentail and creative force

In both cases these oppostute mental attitutes in the end turn into instincts and habits so blind and invincible that, with few exceptions, they still control men’s behavior.

In contrast to which, nowadays governments wear themselfs out imposing uniform customs and laws on populations with nothing yet in common

Morever in politics as in philosophy and religion democratic peoples give a ready welcome to simply general ideas

They are put off by complicated systems and like to picutre a great nation in which every citizens resembles one set type and is controlled by one single power

Next after the idea of a single central power that of uniform legislation eqaully spontaneously takes its place in the though of men in times of equality

The faintest differeces in the political institutions of a single people give him plain and legistaltive uniformity strikes him as the first condition of good government

But this notion of a uniform rule imposed equally on all members of the body social seems to have been strange to men’s thoughts in ages of aristocracy.

Either it did not enter their heads or else they rejected it

Nations easily see the former tendency and resist it. But they let themselves by carried along by the latter without seeing it. So it is most important to point it out

For my part, far from blaming equality for the intractability it inspires, I am chiefly disposed to praise it just for that

I am convinced that anarchy is not the greatest of the ills to be feared in democatic times, but the least

Two tendences int he fact result from equality, the one first leads men directly to independence and could suddenly push them right over into anarchy; the other, by a more roundabout and secret but also more certain raod, leads to them to servitute

This love of independence is the first and most striking freature of the political effects of equality and the one which frightens timid spirits the most

As the citizens have no direct influence on one another, as soon as the central power that holds them in place begins to falter, it would seem that disorder must reach a climax and that, each citizen drawing separately aside, the fabric of society must fall into dust

for my part I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it nowhere does she enjoy a higher station.

And now that I come near the end of this book which which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the American if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of its nation, I should answer that it is due to the surperiority of their women

Thus, then, while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done everything to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man.

In this I think they have wonderfully understood the true conception of democratic progress.

It may, moreoever, be said that our moral standards accord a strange immunity to man, so that virtue is one thing in his case and quite another for his spouse, and that the same act can be seen by public opinion as a crime in the one but onyl a fault ni the other.

The Americans know nothing of this unfair division of duties and rights. With them the seducer is as much dishonored as his victim

Americans constantly display complete confidence in their spouses judgement and deep respect for their freedom. Tehy hold that woman’s mind is just as capable as man’s of discovering the naked truth, and her heart as firm to facce it.

They have never sought to place her virtue, any more than his under the protection of prejudice ignorance or fear

If the American woman is never allowed to leave the quiet sphere of domestic duties, she is also never forced to do so.

As a result American woman who are often manly in their intelligence and in their energy usually preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always have the manners of women though they sometimes show the minds and hearts of men

In america more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct sphere of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths along are never the same.

You will never find American women in charge of the external relations of the family, managing a business or interfering in politics;but they are also never obliged to undertake rough laborer’s work or any task requiring hard physical exertion

That is far from being the American viewof the sort of democratic equality which can be brought about between man and woman. They think that nature, which created such great differences between the physical and moral constituion of men and women, clearly intended to give their diverse faculties a diverse employement; and they consider that progress consists not in making dissimilar creaties do roughly the same things but in giving both a chance to do their job as well as possible.

The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which now dominates industry. They have carefully separated the functoins of man and of woman so that the great work of soicety may be better performed

In Europe there are people who confusing the divergent attributes of the sexes claim to make of man and woman creatures who are, not equal only but actually similar.

It is easy to see that the sort of equality forced on both sexes degrades them both, and that so coarse a jumble of nature’s work could produce nothing but feeble men and unseemly women

I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies those varous inequalities which are in origin social. But is that the end of the matter?

May it not ultimately come to change the great inequality between mamn and woman which has up till now seemed based on the eternal foundations of nature?

At the time of their highest culture the Romans strangled the generals of their enemies when they had dragged them in triumph behind their chariots, and they delievered prisoners over to wild beats for the amusement of the poeple.

Cicero who raised such a storm of complaint about the crucifixation of a Roman citizen, had nothing to say about this atrocious abuse of victor.I

it is evident that in his eyes a stranger is not of the same type of humanity a roman

but as people become more like one another they show themselves reciprocally more compassionate and the law of nations becomes more general

There is a circumstance which conclusively shows that this singular mildness of the Americans is chiefly due to their social condition and that is the way they treat their slaves

It may be that, generally speaking, there is no European colony in the New World where the physical conditions of the blacks are less hard than in the US Nevertheless slaves there suffer terrible affliction and are constantly subject to very cruel punishments

There is no country in which criminal justice is administered with more kindness than in the US. While the English seem bent on carefully preserving in their penal legislation the bloody traces of the Middle ages the Americans have almost elimnated capital punishment from their codes

North America is, I think, the only country on earth which has not taken the life of a single citizen for political offenses during the last fifty years

In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested but they are gentle

Although the Americans may be said to have reduced egoism to a social and philosophic theory, they nonetheless show themselves . They are not disintersted but ehy are gentle

On the other hand whatever enervates and lowers it wekaens it for ever purpose the least as well as the greatest and threatend to make it almost equally impotent in both. Therefore the soul must remain great and strong, if only that it may from time to time put its strength and greatness at the service of the body

If men ever came to be content with physical things only, it seems like that they woudl gradually lose the art of producing them and would end up enjoying them without discernment and without improvement like animals

It is because man is able to raise himself above the things of the body and evnen to scorn itself, a matter of which the beasts have not the least notion, that he can mutliple these same good things of the body to a degree of which they have no conception

Whatever elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul makes it more able to succeed even in those undertakings which are not the soul’s concern

Why is it then, that animals only know how to satisfy their primary and coarest needs, whereas we can infinitely vary and continually increase our delights

That which makes than the brutes in this is that we employ our souls to find which instinct along directs them