in print, we may pass them by. The first | step, then, in our general answer will be: that we have to do with the enunciated principles of the leaders who have given name and existence to the various parties. We cannot accept the dilutions and transformations that certain followers of a party may insist on as the true explication of their master's meaning, and this least of all, when such explications serve only to confuse instead of simplify the principles involved. To take the case in point for an example. Charles Fourier, who is set forth by his followers, sometimes as the author of a new revelation and sometimes as the discoverer of a new science, promulgated a certain theory for the re-organization of society. This theory is founded on sundry imaginary principles of cosmogony, psychology, and harmony, which are in a measure peculiar to himself. If they be false, or rather if they be not indisputably proved true, nothing can be built upon them, and the very name of Fourierism, as a system, must cease. But if they be assumed as true, there are certain results in social and moral life that are their rigorous consequences. These results, it is true, shock the common sentiment of the public, and cause the rejection with horror of the principles whence they flow, even by those who may not be competent to the analysis of ontological formularies or to the detection of their philosophical poison. But we claim the protection of this moral disgust, excited by the tendency and end of Socialism in behalf of existing institutions, and by no means allow to theorists the privilege of cloaking the correlatives of their system till they have first contaminated the community with the unperceived venom of their error, by presenting it under amiable professions and palliated names. Looking thus honestly, therefore, at Socialism, we are ready to show that in any of its phases, it must end in the utter decomposition of society, and the brutalizing of the human race.

In order to present in the fairest manner the bases of Fourier's plan, we shall give so much of it as we here have need of, in Mr. Godwin's words, in the "Popular View" already referred to:

tor governs the world; and in order to obtain a complete knowledge of these laws, he resolved to study simultaneously the highest and lowest orders of creation in the universe. He considered the stars as the highest order of creation, mankind as the middle term, and the inferior orders of creation as the lowest step in the scale. He supposed that there must be certain general laws of unity common to these three orders of existence, or it would be impossible for them to compose one harmonious whole; and he hoped that by studying all that was known in discover the natural laws of correlativeness, the positive sciences concerning them, he might which bind them together in unity and eternity. His principal lever in the work of discovery was a sort of algebraical calculation, by which he supposed that every law that was common to any two of these terms, must be common to the third; and he never abandoned any branch of study until he had discovered those principles of nature which were common to the medium and to the two extremes."―pp. 20, 21.

"He resolved;" "He considered;” “He supposed;" "He hoped!" These were the scientific principles of Fourier's "discovery." He resolved to become omniscient, and as the first step he rejected the authority which had taught man all that he knows of the highest and lowest orders of creation." He considered a part of the material world as "the highest order;" the stars as more noble, more high in the scale of being, more divine than man, whose special glory the Christian religion had taught us is to have been made in the image of God, and to have been preferred before any other, for that alliance which was consummated between God and his creatures in the Incarnation of the Eternal Word. He supposed certain "orders" as the true series and the perfect complex of the universe, and that these were all and in all their parts, one harmonious whole, and subject to "common laws of unity." "He hoped that by studying all that was known in the positive (or physical) sciences," or to express it more clearly, by generalizing the principles of the Newtonian philosophy, he hoped to resolve, consider and suppose them applicable to all orders of being, the highest as the lowest, spiritual as well as material.

hypothesis, and among the rest the axioms," which in their turn were to support the practical part of his system. Such was the fancy of universal interlocking series; an idea borrowed from music, and which he extended to planetary worlds alike, and to all the inclinations and attractions of the human soul; which last, with deeper truth than its advocates admit, are, in the societary system, resolved simply into passions. He supposed again, groups upon each of these passions arranged as the gamut of a harpsichord, with key-notes, major and minor modes, sharps and flats, and the full musical notation; and susceptible of the symphonies of thirds, fifths and octaves. In this system like passions, or rather the same, are to be found in each planet, and in its individual inhabitants; for the soul of man, he teaches us, is but a parcel or atom of the planetary soul. These passions are to the number of twelve. Five are attributed to the five senses respectively, and are called sensual; the rest belong to the soul, and are divided into four affective, and three distributive. The former are friendship, ambition, love and family affection; the latter, which are also called mechanical, are, in the unintelligible cant of the school, the cabaliste, the papillonne, and the composite. The last is the blind excitement, or ecstacy, consequent on the meeting of two or more pleasures, one of the body, the other of the mind, and is the principle of accord. The cabaliste is the taste for intrigue, &c., and is the principle of discord, which, strangely enough, is as essential in the state of harmony, as is the other. The papillonne, as its name (butterfly) indicates, is the taste for change, for variety, for contrasted situations.

Here we must entreat our readers' patience, as we feel the need of it ourselves, in this exposition of the science of Fourierism. These details have a direct import

though without any proof, that they are effects of some of Fourier's twelve, and are produced by the obstacles that the latter meet in attaining their end. But in what manner it can be shown that pride or avarice, or sloth, are thus in all instances called into being, or by the action of which of the twelve, or its repression, we are not told. If it be objected that metaphysicians, with whom the whole subject of the passions has proved a boundless field for discussion, have not followed one another in their enumeration of the emotions to which this name has been attributed, it may be conceded that the name and number of the passions is, in a sense, arbitrary.* But this is not the prominent and real error. What condemns his arrangement of the passions is, that he makes them constitute the entire soul of man; that he makes them include and govern all other parts of the being. In this from Pythagoras to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Aquinas to Leibnitz and Bacon, and from their days. to his own, Fourier would find no countenance from philosophy, if we except such shallow sophistry as was put forth by the pantheistical naturalists who were his cotemporaries, and from whom he in effect gleaned his ideas. But their speculations could be proved as false in physiology as in morals.

We cannot take up the twelve passions of Fourier to criticise them in detail; but let any one possessed of right principles and accustomed to reflection review the enumeration of them we have given, and he will understand sufficiently the enormity of such an idea of man. It makes him a mere animated atom of the globe he inhabits, subjected to irresistible attractions, and therefore stripped of free will, and without any personal intelligence—

It may be questioned, however, whether the number and titles laid down by Aristotle have ever

Socialism. The twelve passions enumerated make up the entire soul of Fourier's man. As to what we have been accustomed to hearing called by the name of passions-hatred, desire, aversion, joy, sorrow, hope, &c.; or again, pride, avarice, sloth, envy, jealousy, &c., &c.-no mention is made of them, or we are told,

sions to eleven-love, hatred, desire, aversion, joy or delight, sorrow, hope, despair, presumption, fear, anger; and St. Thomas Aquinas, adopting these, classified the first six as concupiscible, because they depend simply on the presence or absence of their objects, and desire (concupiscentia) prevails in them; and the last five he called irascible passions, because, added to the presence or absence of the object, there is some difficulty or obstacle to surmount which appeals to anger or courage. This division prevailed in the schools.

for we cannot consider that as intellect, which is but the instrument of natural desires.

And yet Fourier persuaded himself that man was such; he contemplated him as such, when he formed the project of grouping the members of the human family in his new formed associations. His was professedly a passional arrangement. He charged it as a fault on Christianity that it taught the necessity of repressing the passions and inclinations of nature, that it had imposed habits of self-restraint, and mortification of the desires of the flesh. And he proclaimed it as the sum and essence of his doctrine and discovery that: ATTRACTIONS ARE PROPORTIONAL TO DESTINIES. That man has but to throw himself unhesitatingly upon the attractions that solicit him, to follow his bent or bents which way soever, or however far they may lead him, in order to attain his true destiny and to fulfil his mission. Is it necessary, after the mere enunciation of such a proposition, to go into the discussion as to whether man, being such as we know him, and such as all time and all institutions have proved him, and such as all revealed religions have pronounced him, can exist in any society where notions like these shall be instilled into him, and shall not drag down to irreclaimable ruin the whole structure of human existence? In contradiction with authority and with facts, Fourier treats of human passions, which he nevertheless makes the only motives of the soul, as if they were the keys of an organ, sleeping in a perpetual calm till the hand of the master of music shall touch them softly or with emphasis, protracting or cutting short their sound. We will not say how much there is in this fatal to his doctrine of universal analogy, or how much of confusion in itself.

Does he not make the keys of the passions self-moving, and even carrying away with them the soul on which they act? Where then is their analogy with the keys of an organ, that are mute till the musician touches them? But suppose that the passional keys are also mute till the presiding genius shall call them out. Suppose the world Fourierized, and the omniarch, or one of the douzarchs, or onzarchs, to propose a symphony upon some particular passion! When the musician sits down to his instrument he is certain

that the sounds he is about to draw forth from the various keys will be the same that he produced one half hour before; but what security has the Fourierite that the persons composing his diapason shall not meanwhile have experienced, one an increase, and another a diminution, of energy and intensity, according to the caprice, or the variety of the passion in the subject?

Yet

So much, then, for the musical analogy, which is so necessary a part of Fourier's plan; and we might conclude already by saying, so much also for the harmony of the passions so unblushingly assumed as certain, in the proposed associations. as the exorbitant and untrue imagination of Fourier did not intend his theory of the passions to remain as an idle speculation, but made it the very life and essence of the system he proposed to construct in outward society, we cannot be too explicit in pointing out its errors. The denial of liberty to the human will is in nowise accidental to the rest of the plan, but, on the contrary, is one of its fundamental principles. For if we leave in each individual of the human race the power of choosing or rejecting, of following or resisting the various attractions that solicit him, there will be an end of this necessary harmony. Indeed, in an association such as Fourier imagines, personality seems itself a contradiction, as the theory requires that what are called persons should be incapable of occupying any place or following any bent but the one that destiny has, a priori, measured out for them. We find a most striking example in matters of love, which he classes as one of the affective passions: it is clear that he considers each man or woman as swayed and controlled by a particular phase of this passion. It is love in the abstract and not in the concrete that he dreams of, when he supposes it is to operate in harmony, and he farther supposes that it is this abstract phase which is to carry each one to the group where it properly belongs, and that there it will find its satisfaction without any contrariety. But how different will the real passion and the real group prove from the imaginary! In the former it will be love in the concrete that will sway the individual. This man will be attracted towards that woman, who in her turn has been attracted towards

another man. Yet in all the cases that must arise from these various attractions, there will be no jarring, no awaking of the passions of envy, jealousy, grief, or hatred! For Fourier attributes these to the subversive order, as only arising from the faults of the present civilization. In the harmony of Fourierism, forsooth, either no two men will ever love the same woman, or the mutual knowledge of this affection will never excite any other emotion than one of complacency in the breasts of each! Or to vary the case: either death will itself be forever abrogated by men turning Fourierites, (which has not quite been asserted as yet at least in its absolute form,) or, when the wife, the mother, or the child dies, it will so happen, as a law of nature, that at the same moment the affection of the friends of such an one towards her will have been fully satisfied, and will then turn away cheerfully to form new relationships. Truly, this new science would be wonderful were it not absurd.

It is here that we should properly treat in detail of Fourier's doctrine respecting the intercourse of the sexes. But as this is always a delicate subject, so in respect to Socialism, and to Fourier's principles in particular, we doubt whether even the advantage of overwhelming his abominable system with a torrent of public indignation could compensate for defiling our pages and the English language with a bare recital of the outrages that he proposes not only against Christian morals but against the modesty which man has hitherto been found to cherish even in the barbarous and savage states. Our pen refuses the task, and we confine ourselves to generalities. As we have seen, it is Fourier's general principle that man's true destiny is to follow all the attractions of his nature and he avows it as one of its legitimate results, that as there should be groups of vestals in his association to satisfy the passion or attraction for chastity, so there must be groups and series for gallantry and mock sentiment; and so on down to lower and lower groups, even to the bacchantes and bayaderes, for whom he has reserved a place of honor and consideration. Add to this the instability of marriages, which he makes depend on the temporary caprice of the united pair, who are free to be divorced and re-married indefinitely, (if

it be not a scandal to apply the term marriage to such unions,) and what a picture does it present of the morals of Fourierism! We cannot better illustrate it than by a passage from a report made by a converted Saint Simonian of a dispute between Enfantin, the "Supreme Father" of Saint Simonism, and two of his revolted children who had declared their intention of withdrawing from him "and from his doctrine, which at bottom was nothing else than a hideous promiscuity."

Carnot. "Your doctrine is the making a rule of adultery.'

Enfantin.-"This doctrine will never lead to adultery; adultery exists only because one nature is crushed by another, for which it has no attraction. The ideas that I advance, on the contrary, will prevent adultery.'

Dugiel.-" It is true there will be no more adultery, for vice will be legitimatised, reduced to rule. It is in this sense only that you can self can judge that it is so, if you have studied there will be no more adultery. You yoursay the general principles on which all these ideas

rest.

And it is to the study of these very principles that we would earnestly invite the candid among the Socialists, if it might be, but at any rate, we demand such an examination on the part of persons not identified with Socialist theories, and to whose opinion, whether with reason or not, weight may be attached, before they venture to speculate as to the permissibility or the innocency of Fourierism in any shape, or with any amount of modifications. Every odious abomination of Communism that has been charged on Fourierism is a legitimate consequence of the first principles of the latter system, and would inevitably follow quick upon the reduction of the Socialist theory to practice. Socialists substitute aggregations of the race as the basis of civil life, instead of the marriage, or family relation, which God made the basis, and which their highest pretension is but to tolerate as a phase in association. And into this association are to be invited men and women, to whom it is to be said: "You are now delivered from the re[straints of civilization, which are evil; henceforth your passions are to be your only guides, and the satisfaction of them

* Religion St. Simonienne, p. 42.

your inheritance; only enter with zeal upon your heritage, and act yourselves out!" When the avowed intentions of a given set of men are to establish such associations, and to inculcate and act on such principles, what attention is it necessary to pay to any extenuations they may attempt of their infamous crimes! What embarrassment are men of sense, and who believe at least in natural virtue, to feel at the reclamations of Fourierites that their founder "the true Teacher, whose system fulfils all the aspirations of the past"*has "resolved," has "considered," has "supposed," has "hoped," that the passions thus fomented would be found to act in perfect harmony with each other and with the universe! For our part we hold the mission of such propagandists in abhorrence, whatever may be their apparent amiability, for we know its tendencies, and have good reason to distrust its source.

66

In vain, with other Fourierites, Mr. Godwin repeats to us that it is "only the practical side of Fourier's doctrine which is universally adopted and defended by the whole school of Societary Reformers;" and that the doctrines "of Customs, Beliefs, &c.," that shock the moral sense of mankind now, "are to be accepted or rejected by the generations of the future, according to the light which time and investigation may throw upon them." For only six lines before, he has acknowledged: "It is obvious that Law, Government, Manners, (Morals,) and Religion, would all be more or less affected by a unitary régime of Industry, as they would all be influenced to bring themselves under the operation of some unitary law;"t-this law being pantheism, materialism, or a jumble of both. We have found it difficult, here, to persuade ourselves that delusion itself can have so blinded the eyes of such theorists, as that they should not have been aware that they were making use of a trick instead of an argument. But in the pamphlet from which we have just quoted, there prevails such a cynicism in respect to all religion, whether natural or revealed, and to all the doctrines that the effect of Christian teaching has domiciled in the public mind, that to trifle or beguile]

Godwin's Popular View, p. 18.

+ "Popular View," &c., pp. 73, 74.

in such matters must appear to its author an excusable diversion. To show that we are not judging rashly in this point, we will cite a passage from his memoir of one whom he styles a "social architect," and "one of the most extraordinary men that ever lived"-being no other than Robert Dale Owen, of Lanark. After recounting his earlier Mr. progress, Godwin continues:-

"But while his popularity was at its flood, he ran foul of the breakers. Before this, he had not developed his opinions on the subject of religion and politics, satisfying himself with a negative toleration of creeds and parties. His business had been to organize labor; he now undertook the criticism of church and state. He openly accused all existing religions of falsehood and impotence; he denied the personal responsibility of the individual, whose destiny, he said, was controlled exclusively by society; and he argued that all systems of reform, other than those which looked to a reform of outward circumstances, must inevitably lead to injustice, oppression, and misery."

It would seem that Fourierites think to keep off the reefs, by continuing longer the exclusive profession of "organizing labor," and holding in abeyance the rest of their doctrines. But our object in this citation was to animadvert on the following analysis of Owen's principles, which is presented to us as complete:

"His errors are the denial of personal responwhich we hold to be utterly untenable in argusibillty, and the doctrine of common property, ment, radically defective in morals, and of course, extremely pernicious to society. But our limits will not allow us to discuss the matter.

"His truths are, or rather his services have been, that he has taught moralists and the outward circumstances upon inward well-being world the important, almost vital, influence of and happiness. He may be called the Apostle of Circumstance."*