French thought—as to this I follow largely Mr. Brownell’s penetrating study[145]—seems to be not only more centralized in place, that is, more dominated by the capital, but also, leaving aside certain notorious divisions, more uniform, more authoritative, more intolerant, more obviously _solidaire_. There is less initiative, less aggressive non-conformity. French sentiment emphasizes equality much more than individual freedom and is somewhat intolerant of any marked departure from the dominant types of thought. There is more jealousy of personal power, especially in politics, and less of that eager yet self-poised sympathy with triumphant personality which we find in England or America. There is, in fact, more need to be jealous of a personal ascendency, because, when it once gains sway, there is less to check it. And with all this goes the French system of public education, whose well-known uniformity, strictness of discipline and classical conservatism is both cause and effect of the trend toward formal solidarity. There is also an intolerance of the un-French and an inability to understand it even greater, perhaps, than the corresponding phenomenon in other nations. The French are self-absorbed and care little for the history of other peoples. Nor are they sympathetic with contemporaries. “In Paris, certainly,” says Mr. Brownell, “the foreigner, hospitably as he is invariably treated, is invariably treated as the foreigner that he is.”[146] The relative weakness of individuality in France is due, of course, not to any lack of self-feeling, but to the fact that the Frenchman identifies himself more with the social whole, and, merged in that, does not take his more particular self so seriously. It is rather a we-feeling than an I-feeling, and differentiates France more sharply from other nations than it does the individual Frenchman from his compatriots. “He does not admire France because she is his country. His complacence with himself proceeds from the circumstance that he is a Frenchman; which is distinctly what he is first, being a man afterward.”[147] “One never hears the Frenchman boast of the character and quality of his compatriots as Englishmen and ourselves do. He is thinking about France, about her different _gloires_, about her position at the head of civilization.”[148] As there is less individuality in general, so there is a happy lack of whimsical and offensive oddity, of sharp corners and bad taste. Mr. Brownell finds nothing more significant than the absence in France of prigs. “One infers at once in such a society a free and effortless play of the faculties, a large, humorous and tolerant view of oneself and others, leisure, calm, healthful and rational vivacity, a tranquil confidence in one’s own perceptions and in the intelligence of one’s neighbors.”[149]