have his place and duties assigned to
him. Society consists of three classes of workers--industrial workers,
savants, and artists. A commission of eminent workers of each class will
determine the place of every individual according to his capacities.
Complete equality is absurd; inequality, based on merit, is reasonable
and necessary. It is a modern error to distrust state authority. A power
directing national forces is requisite, to propose great ideas and to
make the innovations necessary for Progress. Such an organisation will
promote progress in all domains: in science by co-operation, in industry
by credit, and in art too, for artists will learn to express the ideas
and sentiments of their own age. There are signs already of a tendency
towards something of this kind; its realisation must be procured, not by
revolution but by gradual change.

In the authoritarian character of the organisation to which these
apostles of Progress wished to entrust the destinies of man we may see
the influence of the great theocrat and antagonist of Progress, Joseph
de Maistre. He taught them the necessity of a strong central power and
the danger of liberty.

But the fullest exposition of the Saint-Simonian doctrine of development
was given by Bazard, one of the chief disciples, a few years later.
[Footnote: Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne, 2 vols., 1830-1.]
The human race is conceived as a collective being which unfolds its
nature in the course of generations, according to a law--the law
of Progress--which may be called the physiological law of the human
species, and was discovered by Saint-Simon. It consists in the
alternation of ORGANIC and CRITICAL epochs. [Footnote: In the Globe,
which became an organ of Saint-Simonism in 1831, Enfantin announced a
new principle (Weill, op. cit. 107). He defined the law of history as
"the harmony, ceaselessly progressive, of flesh and spirit, of industry
and science, of east and west, of woman and man." The role of woman
played a large part in the teaching of the sect.

Saint-Simon's law of organic and critical ages was definitely accepted
by H. de Ferron, a thinker who did not belong to the school, as late as
1867. See his Theorie du progres, vol. ii. p. 433.]

In an organic epoch men discern a destination and harmonise all their
energies to reach it. In a critical epoch they are not conscious of
a goal, and their efforts are dispersed and discordant. There was an
organic period in