om a learned society, and I have an academy as sponsor"; certainly a
remarkable boast for one who denied all authority.

Proudhon appears to have travelled very quickly along the road which
led from the regions of faith to the metaphysics prevailing at that
time; and already he took for his criterion--as he tells us later in
his _Confessions_--the proposition (drawn up according to the Hegelian
theory, that everything when it is legalised at the same time brings
its opposite with it), "that every principle which is pursued to its
farthest consequence arrives at a contradiction when it must be
considered false and repudiated; and that, if this false principle has
given rise to an institution, this institution itself must be regarded
as an artificial product and as a Utopia." This proposition Proudhon
later on formulated as follows: "Every true thought is conceived in
time once, and breaks up in two directions. As each of these
directions is the negation of the other and both can only disappear in
a higher idea, it follows that the negation of law is itself the law
of life and progress, and the principle of continual movement." Here,
indeed, we have Proudhon's whole teaching; with this magic wand of
negation of law he thought he could open the magic world of social
problems, and heal up the wounds of the social organisation.

"My masters," said Proudhon to his friend Langlois in the year 1848,
"that is those who woke fruitful ideas in me, are three: first of all,
the Bible, then Adam Smith, and finally Hegel." Proudhon always
boasted of being Hegel's pupil, and Karl Marx maintained that it was
he who, during his stay in Paris in the year 1844, in debates which
often lasted all night long, inoculated Proudhon (to the latter's
great disadvantage) with Hegelianism, which he nevertheless could not
properly study owing to his ignorance of the German language. A
well-known anecdote attributes to Hegel the witty saying that only one
scholar understood him and he misunderstood him. We do not know who
this scholar was, but it might just as well have been Marx as
Proudhon, for that which both of them took from the great philosopher,
and applied as and how and when they did, is common to both: namely,
the dialectic method applied to the problems of social philosophy.

The similarity between them in this respect is so striking that one
might call both these embittered opponents the personal antitheses of
the great master, Hegel. As