Pragmatism is the only original philosophical tradition that was born on American soil and so, not surprisingly, it reflects ideas implicitly accepted in the United States since the founding of this country. Because pragmatism's highest ideal is action, it corresponds with the intuitive attitude of an egalitarian nation built by immigrants eager to abandon the traditions and restricting certitudes of the old world. Europeans, accordingly, tend to look down on pragmatism as a peculiarly American ideology driven only by success. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in the 1830s, saw a people who were more concerned with results than with first principles. Each man in America, Tocqueville observed, "undertakes to be sufficient unto himself and glories in the fact that his beliefs about everything are peculiar to himself. No longer do ideas but interests only form the links between men." Thus from the beginning, Americans stressed the extent to which ideas were practical.