hem in despair from the shadowy
corner where he remained motionless, never once joining in the
discussions. Distracted, by his own unbelief and thirst for truth, he had
at the outset taken a passionate interest in these debates, desirous as
he was of drawing up a balance-sheet of the century's ideas, so as to
form some notion of the distance that had been travelled, and the profits
that had accrued. But he recoiled from all this in fresh despair, on
hearing the others argue, each from his own standpoint and without
possibility of concession and agreement. After the repulses he had
encountered at Lourdes and Rome, he well realised that in this fresh
experiment which he was making with Paris, the whole brain of the century
was in question, the new truths, the expected gospel which was to change
the face of the world. And, burning with inconsiderate zeal, he went from
one belief to another, which other he soon rejected in order to adopt a
third. If he had first felt himself to be a Positivist with Morin, an
Evolutionist and Determinist with Guillaume, he had afterwards been
touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in
Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily
shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative
Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and
each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic
contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a
continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although
Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon he denied him in part; and if
Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the
other's conducted to an unacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon,
for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created
method and declared science to be the one and only sovereign, had not
even suspected the advent of the social crisis which now threatened to
sweep all away, and had finished personally as a mere worshipper of love,
overpowered by woman. Nevertheless, these two, Comte and Proudhon,
entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon;
the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so
blind that the truths common to them all were obscured and disfigured
beyond recognition. Thence came the extraordinary muddle of the present
hour; Bache with Saint-Simon and Fourier, and M