Ours, then, is an Age of Diffusion. The best minds and hearts seek joy and self-forgetfulness in active service, as in another time they might seek it in solitary worship; God, as we often hear, being sought more through human fellowship and less by way of isolate self-consciousness than was the case a short time since. I need hardly particularize the educational and philanthropic zeal that, in one form or another, incites the better minds among our contemporaries and makes them feel guilty when they are not in some way exerting themselves to spread abroad material or spiritual goods. No one would wish to see this zeal diminished; and perhaps it makes in the long run for every kind of worthy achievement; but its immediate effect is often to multiply the commonplace, giving point to De Tocqueville’s reflection that “in aristocracies a few great pictures are produced, in democratic countries a vast number of insignificant ones.”[88] In a spiritual as well as a material sense there is a tendency to fabricate cheap goods for an uncritical market. “Men and gods are too extense.”[89] Finally, all theories that aim to deduce from social conditions the limits of personal achievement must be received with much caution. It is the very nature of a virile sense of self to revolt from the usual and the expected and pursue a lonesome road. Of course it must have support, but it may find this in literature and imaginative intercourse. So, in spite of everything, we have had in America men of signal distinction—such, for instance, as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman—and we shall no doubt have more. We need fear no dearth of inspiring issues; for if old ones disappear energetic minds will always create new ones by making greater demands upon life. The very fact that our time has so largely cast off all sorts of structure is in one way favorable to enduring production, since it means that we have fallen back upon human nature, upon that which is permanent and essential, the adequate record of which is the chief agent in giving life to any product of the mind. FOOTNOTES: [75] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book iv, chap. 7. But elsewhere he expresses the opinion that this levelling and confusion is only temporary. See, for example, book iii, chap. 21. [76] Republic, book viii. [77] Outre-Mer. English Translation, 306. [78] See the final chapter of his French Traits. [79] Conversation with Eckermann, May 12, 1825. [80] French Traits, 385, 387, 393. [81] Poe is the only notable exception that occurs to me. [82] Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, ii, 100, 101. [83] Our most notable group of writers—flourishing at Concord and Boston about 1850—is, of course, connected with the maturing, in partial isolation, of a local type of culture, now disintegrated and dispersed on the wider currents of the time. [84] Outre-Mer, 25. [85] In his essay on Balzac. [86] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 10.