ition. By a direct and total subversion of
political notions, the most fundamental, it represents
government as being, by its nature, the necessary enemy of
society, against which it sedulously places itself in a
constant state of suspicion and watchfulness; it is disposed
incessantly to restrain more and more its sphere of activity,
in order to prevent its encroachments, and tends finally to
leave it no other than the simple functions of general police,
without any essential participation in the supreme direction of
the action of the collective body or of its social development.

"Approaching to a more detailed examination of this doctrine,
it is evident that the absolute right of free examination
(which, connected as it is with the liberty of the press and
the freedom of education, is manifestly its principal and
fundamental dogma) is nothing else, in reality, but the
consecration, under the vicious abstract form common to all
metaphysic conceptions, of that transitional state of unlimited
liberty in which the human mind has been spontaneously placed,
in consequence of the irrevocable decay of the theologic
philosophy, and which must naturally remain till the
establishment in the social domain of the positive method.[49]
... However salutary and indispensable in its historical
position, this principle opposes a grave obstacle to the
reorganization of society, by being erected into an absolute
and permanent dogma. To examine always without deciding ever,
would be deemed great folly in any individual. How can the
dogmatic consecration of a like disposition amongst all
individuals, constitute the definitive perfection of the social
order, in regard, too, to ideas whose finity it is so
peculiarly important, and so difficult, to establish? Is it not
evident, on the contrary, that such a disposition is, from its
nature, radically anarchical, inasmuch as, if it could be
indefinitely prolonged, it must hinder every true mental
organization?

"No association whatever, though destined for a special and
temporary purpose, and though limited to a small number of
individuals, can subsist without a certain degree of reciprocal
confidence, both intellectual and moral, between its members,
each one of whom finds a continual necessity for a crow