a disturbance in
the secular system formed by the co-ordination and mutual adaptation of
laws, customs, morality, and institutions! What a rupture of the inward
equilibrium which maintains man passive and tranquil! The consequent
mental agitation will lead to agitation, impulsion, ambitions,
lassitude, despondency, and disorder in all the sentiments which had
thus far maintained every species of society, the family, the commune,
the Church, free association and the State!--Now, along with the
immediate effects of science on the intellectual habits of men consider
the effects of its application to their material condition; at first,
their increased well-being, their power increased, then the rupture of
the ties that bind them to their birthplace, the concentration of masses
of workmen in the towns to which they are attracted by great and rapid
industrial development, the influx of new ideas, of every species of
information, the gradual decline of the old hereditary prejudices of
caste and parish which act automatically as instincts, and are useful
as instincts to the small groups in which the individual is born and
in which he lives. How could such a profound change in the condition of
humanity fail to undermine everywhere the order of things which group
men together? Why should not the new milieu at once attack all ancient
forms of society? For, at the moment of its establishment, there exists
in Europe a general form of society manifest through features in common;
a monarchy--hereditary royalty, dynastic but frequently limited, at
least in fact,--a privileged nobility performing military service as a
special function, a clergy organized as a Church, proprietary and
more or less privileged, local or special bodies also proprietary--
provinces, communes, universities, brotherhoods, corporations--laws and
customs which base the family on paternal authority, perpetuating it on
the natal soil and by social rank; in brief, institutions which modern
ideas disturb in every direction, the first effect of which is,
while developing the spirit of doubt and investigation, to break down
subordination to the king, to the gentleman, to the noble, and, in
general, to dissolve society founded on heredity. Such phenomena are
already observable everywhere, the ruin of feeble corporations by the
state, its constant tendency to interference, to the absorption of every
special service and the descent of power into the hands of a numerical
m