7. 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
expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the
universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical 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, which alone
remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless
transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer
that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man
-nay, rather because it destroys that individuality -will have
secret charms for men living in democracies. All their habits of
thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt
it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it
fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their
minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy
endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one
of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages.
Against it all who abide in their attachment to the true
greatness of man should struggle and combine.