tain it by means of
federative organisations, as he had sketched it in his earlier
writings. Even in this period of mental maturity, when removed from
political agitation, he remained the sworn enemy and direct opponent
of the Communists, and wished to see the great problem of the best
arrangement of society solved, not by universal levelling down, but by
the general perfection and development of society; not by revolution
from which he had gained nothing but disgust and disillusionment, but
by evolution. "If ideas will rise up," he used to say, "then even the
paving stones would rise up themselves if the Government were so
imprudent as to wait for this."

With true prophetic insight Proudhon perceived the fact that even in
human society revolution is everything; with a clearness of vision
such as none before him, and only very few after him, have possessed,
he always insisted upon the organic character of human society and the
natural continuity between animal and human social life; and in this
lies his greatness, which will never be diminished by any of his
numerous errors. But while he thus with one foot for the first time
trod upon the ground of a new discovery, with the other he stood on
the standpoint of social philosophy of previous centuries. He could
neither externally nor internally disassociate himself from its
baseless assumptions of a social contract, the absolute rights of man,
a moral order of the universe, and similar ethical views of politics;
and herein lies the contradiction upon which his great mental talents
were shipwrecked. If we once regard human society as Proudhon did, as
something real, the product of nature which is moved and develops
itself according to the laws of the rest of nature, then we have once
for all given up the right to mark out for it a line of development
determined merely by speculation, or to demand from it that it should
move towards any particular goal, however well-intentioned it may be.
A breeder may produce in his pigeons or fowls a certain kind of
feather or a certain form of pouting, but he cannot change the pigeon
into a hen. The artificial selection of breeding is all that man can
do (_pour corriger la nature_) against the free progress of natural
development. This is not so insignificant as one may be inclined to
believe at the first glance. The latter belongs to the category of
Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and of that Utopian social philosophy which
began with Plato, a