ng is better known than their names and their works: The _Republic_
of Plato, Thomas More's _Utopia_, Campanella's _City of the Sun_,
Harrington's _Oceana_, Fenelon's _Salente_, etc.[141] However idealistic
they may be, one could easily show that all the materials of their ideal
are taken from the surrounding reality, they bear the stamp of the
_milieu_, be it Greek, English, Christian, etc., in which they lived,
and it should not be forgotten that in the Utopians everything is not
chimerical--some have been revealers, others have acted as stimuli or
ferments. True to its mission, which is to make innovations, the
constructive imagination is a spur that arouses; it hinders social
routine and prevents stagnation.

Among the creators of ideal societies there is one, almost contemporary,
who would deserve a study of individual psychology--Ch. Fourier. If it
is a question merely of fertility in pure construction, I doubt whether
we could find one superior to him--he is equal to the highest, with the
special characteristic of being at the same time exuberant to delirium
and exact in details to the least minutiae. He is such a fine type of the
imaginative intellect that he deserves that we stop a moment.

His cosmogony seems the work of an omnipotent demiurge fashioning the
universe at will. His conception of the future world with its
"counter-cast" creations, where the present ugliness and troubles of
animal reign become changed into their opposites, where there will be
"anti-lions," "anti-crocodiles," "anti-whales," etc., is one example of
hundreds showing his inexhaustible richness in fantastic visions: the
work of an imagination that is hot and overflowing, with no rational
preoccupation.

On the other hand, his psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis
borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries.
Assuming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he assigns it first a
period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five
thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period of
completion, 9,000 years; and then a period of "descending subversion,"
whose first stage is 27,000 years, and the second 4,000 years--a total
of 81,000 years. This form of imagination is already known to us.[142]

The principal part of his psychology, the theory of the emotions,
questionable in many respects, is relatively rational. But in the
construction of human society, the duality of his im