The responsibility of mind in a civilization of machines

since 1840, when Alexis de Tocqueville published the second volume of Democracy in America, which was quickly translated and avidly studied in the United States, anyone speaking formally about the role of intellect in our civilization is virtually forced to invoke Chapters IX and X of his First Book to explain why, to repeat his own chapter heading, "the Americans are more addicted to practical than to theoretical science." We must be meticulous, therefore, to observe sanctified ritual by reciting, as though an incantation to the gods, at least a few of Tocqueville's venerable pronouncements. Certain of these are worth repeating when we recollect how immensely helpful they were to pioneer champions of the "theoretical" in the early struggles of American scientific ambition. In the long and bitter fight over the structure of the Smithsonian Institution, for instance a battle which, by the ironic comedy of Smithson's leaving his bequest "to the United States of America," had to be fought, of all unlikely places, on the floors of Congress Tocqueville proved a powerful aid to Joseph Henry, Alexander Bache and John Quincy Adams in their resistance to the Congressional attempts to furnish only a menial trade school. The victory, in 1 846, of these eastern "theoreticians" over the grim-faced "utilitarians" from Ohio and Indiana is customarily saluted in chronicles of the American mind as a vindication of Tocqueville's bold surmise that the then observable state of American culture was not to be taken, considering the nation's youth and immaturity, as precluding in some distant