agination--powerful
and minute--reappears. We know his methodical organization: the _group_,
composed of seven to nine persons; the _series_, comprising twenty-four
to thirty-two groups; a _phalanx_ that includes eighteen groups,
constituting the phalanstery; the small city, a general center of
phalanges; the provincial city, the imperial capital, the universal
metropolis. He has a passion for classification and ordering; "his
phalanstery works like a clock."

This rare imaginative type well deserved a few remarks, because of its
mixture of apparent exactness and a natural, unconscious utopianism and
extravagance. For, beneath all these pulsating inventions of precise,
petty details, the foundation is none the less a purely speculative
construction of the mind. Let us add an incredible abuse of analogy,
that chief intellectual instrument of invention, of which only the
reading of his books can give an idea.[143] Heinrich Heine said of
Michelet, "He has a Hindoo imagination." The term would apply still
better to Fourier, in whom coexist unchecked profusion of images and the
taste for numerical accumulations. People have tried to explain this
abundance of figures and calculation as a professional habit--he was for
a long time a bookkeeper or cashier, always an excellent accountant. But
this is taking the effect for cause. This dualism existed in the very
nature of his mind, and he took advantage of it in his calling. The
study of the numerical imagination[144] has shown how it is frequently
met with among orientals, whose imaginative development is unquestioned,
and we have seen why the idealistic imagination agrees so well with the
indefinite series of numbers and makes use of it as a vehicle.

II

With practical inventors and reformers the ideal falls--not that they
sacrifice it for their personal interests, but because they have a
comprehension of possibilities. The imaginative construction must be
corrected, narrowed, mutilated, if it is to enter into the narrow frame
of the conditions of existence, until it becomes adapted and determined.
This process has been described several times, and it is needless to
repeat it here in other terms. Nevertheless, the ideal--understanding by
this term the unifying principle that excites creative work and supports
it in its development--undergoes metamorphosis and must be not only
individual but collective; the creation does not realize itself save
through a "communion of mind