Among the many problems before them they have this to solve, whether a republic is able to foster the highest forms of genius.  You are familiar with the writings of De Tocqueville, and must be aware of the intense sympathy which he felt for your institutions; and this sympathy is all the more valuable from the philosophic candour with which he points out not only your merits, but your defects and dangers.  Now if I come here to speak of science in America in a critical and captious spirit, an invisible radiation from my words and manner will enable you to find me out, and will guide your treatment of me to-night.  But if I in no unfriendly spirit—­in a spirit, indeed, the reverse of unfriendly—­venture to repeat before you what this great historian and analyst of democratic institutions said of America, I am persuaded that you will hear me out.  He wrote some three and twenty years ago, and, perhaps, would not write the same to-day; but it will do nobody any harm to have his words repeated, and, if necessary, laid to heart.

In a work published in 1850, De Tocqueville says:  ’It must be confessed that, among the civilized peoples of our age, there are few in which the highest sciences have made so little progress as in the United States.’[27] He declares his conviction that, had you been alone in the universe, you would soon have discovered that you cannot long make progress in practical science without cultivating theoretic science at the same time.  But, according to De Tocqueville, you are not thus alone.  He refuses to separate America from its ancestral home; and it is there, he contends, that you collect the treasures of the intellect, without taking the trouble to create them.

De Tocqueville evidently doubts the capacity of a democracy to foster genius as it was fostered in the ancient aristocracies.  ‘The future,’ he says, ’will prove whether the passion for profound knowledge, so rare and so fruitful, can be born and developed as readily in democratic societies as in aristocracies.  For my part,’ he continues, ‘I can hardly believe it.’  He speaks of the unquiet feverishness of democratic communities, not in times of great excitement, for such times may give an extraordinary impetus to ideas, but in times of peace.  There is then, he says, ’a small and uncomfortable agitation, a sort of incessant attrition of man against man, which troubles and distracts the mind without imparting to it either loftiness or animation.’  It rests with you to prove whether these things are necessarily so—­whether scientific genius cannot find, in the midst of you, a tranquil home.