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Johnson for his interest in such "spiritual" questions as second sight.
Rousseau called materialism "a philosophy convenient for the happy and
rich, who make their paradise in this world." In many instances the
antimaterialism of such writers was less a coherent position than a strong
distaste for something they regarded as vulgar and immoral.
Tocqueville was also a critic of philosophical materialism. In
Democracy in America,
Tocqueville says: "There are many things that of–
fend me about the materialists. I think their doctrines pernicious, and
their pride revolts me." For Tocqueville, like Rousseau, materialism is
not simply a philosophical outlook. It is a way of looking at the world
that inevitably leads to a way of acting in the world. Philosophical
materialism, Tocqueville implies, provides a justification for ordinary ma–
terialism. He warns that "in all nations materialism is a dangerous malady
of the human spirit," but it is especially dangerous in a democracy, for
the citizens of democratic states tend "to favor the taste for physical
pleasures. "
Although Tocqueville strongly disliked philosophical materialism,
his criticism of materialism in all its guises is much milder than Rousseau's
- mainly because he doesn't think ordinary materialism is a strong force
in the world. "The heart of man," he says, "embraces much more than
we suppose; it can at the same time contain a taste for the good things
of this world and love of heavenly things; at times it seems madly intent
on one of the two, but it is never long before it thinks of the other."
Very much a student of Pascal, Tocqueville thinks man is a contradictory
creature who is often pulled in two different directions at once. Materi–
alism, then, will eventually be undercut by spirituality. And vice versa.
Even though democracy makes man more disposed to seek "physical
pleasures," Tocqueville was not worried that Americans would succumb
to ordinary materialism. For Americans, he says, are a church-going
people, despite their materialistic bent. In church, "the American ...
escapes from himself'; in church the American becomes "free from the
petty passions that trouble his life and the passing interests that fill it, [so
that] he suddenly breaks into an ideal world where all is great, pure, and
eternal." Tocqueville implies that so long as Americans remain a church–
going people, they will never completely succumb to ordinary
materialism.
When Tocqueville speaks of "spiritual pleasures," he means some–
thing specific: conventional religious worship. In anchoring spirituality to
church-going, Tocqueville was going against the grain of nineteenth–
century thought. Even before Tocqueville wrote
Democracy in America,
