THE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL PRINCIPLES. 153 ing crisis without serious danger. To be always examining and never deciding would be regarded as something like madness in private conduct and no dogmatic consecration of such conduct in all individuals could constitute any perfection of social order, with regard to ideas which it is much more essential, and much more difficult to establish beyond the reach of dispute. There are very few persons who consider themselves fit to sit in judgment on the astronomical, physical, and chemical ideas which are destined to enter into social circulation; and everybody is willing that those ideas should direct corresponding operations; and here we see the beginnings of intellectual government. Can it be supposed that the most important and the most delicate conceptions, and those which by their complexity are accessible to only a small number of highlyprepared understandings, are to be abandoned to the arbitrary and variable decisions of the least competent minds? If such an anomaly could be imagined permanent, a dissolution of the social state must ensue, through the evergrowing divergence of individual understandings, delivered over to their disorderly natural impulses in the most vague and easily perverted of all orders of ideas. The speculative inertia common to most minds, and perhaps, to a certain extent, the wise reserve of popular good sense, tend, no doubt, to restrict such political aberrations: but these are influences too feeble to root out the pretension of every man to set himself up as a sovereign arbiter of social theories;--a pretension which every intelligent man blames in others, with a reservation, more or less explicit, of his own personal competency. Now the intellectual reorganization cannot proceed amidst such a state of things, because the convergence of minds requires the renunciation by the greater number of their right of individual inquiry on subjects above their qualifications, and requiring, more than any others, a real and permanent agreement. Then again, the unbridled ambition of illprepared intellects rushes in among the most complex and obscure questions: and these disturbances, though they must finally neutralize each other, make terrible devastation in the interval; and each one that is destroyed makes way for another; so that the issue of these con troversies is a perpetual aggravation of the intellectual anarchy. No association whatever, even of the smallest number of individuals, and for the most temporary objects, can subsist without a certain degree of reciprocal confidence, intellectual and moral, among its members, each one of whom has incessantly to act upon views which he must admit on the faith of some one else. If it is so in this limited case, there is something monstrous in proposing the opposite procedure in the case of the whole human race, each one of whom is at an extreme distance from the collective point of view, and is the last person of the whole number fit to judge of the rules by which his personal action should be directed. Be the intellectual development of each and all what it may, social order must ever be incompatible with a perpetual discussion of the foundations of society. Systematic toleration can exist only with regard to opinions which are considered indifferent or doubtful, as we see in that aspect of the revolutionary spirit which takes its stand on Protestantism, where the innumerable Christian sects are too weak to pretend to spiritual dominion, but where there is as fierce an intolerance about any common point of doctrine or discipline as in the Romish Church itself. And when the critical doctrine was, at the beginning of the French Revolution, supposed to be organic, we know how the directors of the movement strove to obtain a general assent, voluntary or forced, to the dogmas of the revolutionary philosophy, which they regarded as the bases of social order, and therefore above controversy. We shall see hereafter what are the due limits of the right of free inquiry, in a general way, and in regard to our own social period. It is enough to observe here that political good sense has adopted, to express the first requisite of all organization, that fine axiom of the Catholic Church; in necessary things, unity: in doubtful things, liberty: in all things, charity-a maxim which admirably proposes the problem, without, however, suggesting the principles by which it must be solved, and that unity attained which would be a mere illusion if it did not result, in the first instance, from free discussion. The dogma which ranks next in importance to that of DOGMA OF EQUALITY. 155 Dogma of free inquiry is that of Equality; and in the same way, it is taken to be absolute when it is only relative, and permanent, while it expresses merely the position of minds employed in breaking up the old system. It is an immediate consequence of liberty of conscience, which brings after it the most fundamental equality of all, that of intelligence. The supposition of its being absolute was not less necessary in this case than the former: for, if all social classification had not been systematically disallowed, the old corporations would have preserved their sway, from the impossibility of their conceiving of any other classification. To this day we have no sufficiently distinct notion ourselves of such an arrangement as would be truly appropriate to a new state of civilization. When the dogma of equality had achieved the overthrow of the old polities, it could not but become an obstacle to any reorganization, because its activity must then be directed against the bases of any new classification whatever; for, of course, any classification must be incompatible with the equality that was claimed for all. Since the abolition of slavery, there has been no denial, from any quarter, of the right of every man (innocent of strong anti-social conduct) to expect from all others the fulfilment of the conditions necessary to the natural development of his personal activity, suitably directed: but beyond that undisputed right, men cannot be made, because they are not, equal, nor even equivalent; and they cannot therefore possess, in a state of association, any identical rights beyond the great original one. The simple physical inequalities which fix the attention of superficial observers are much less marked than intellectual and moral differences; and the progress of civilization tends to increase these more important differences, as much as to lessen the inferior kind: and, applied to any assemblage of persons thus developed, the dogma of equality becomes anarchical, and directly hostile to its original destination. The second result of the dogma of liberty Dogma of the of conscience is the Sovereignty of the Sovereignty of people: and, like the former, it wrought at the People. first the double service of destroying the old régime and preparing for a new one. Till the final system could be ! constituted, the only safeguard against the renewed supremacy of the old one was in the setting up of provisional institutions, which the peoples claimed the absolute right to change at will. It was only by means of the doctrine of popular sovereignty that that succession of political endeavours could take place which must precede the installation of a true system of government, whenever the intellectual renovation of society shall be sufficiently advanced to settle the conditions and natural extent of the different sovereignties. Meanwhile, in discharging its function, this dogma proves its revolutionary character before our eyes, by opposing all reorganization, condemning, as it does, all the superior to an arbitrary dependence on the multitude of the inferior, by a kind of transference to the peoples of the divine right which had become the opprobrium of kings. Dogma of Na- The revolutionary spirit of the critical doctrine manifests itself no less clearly when we look at international relations. The necessity of order being in this case more equivocal and obscure, the absence of all regulating power has been more ingenuously declared than in other cases. When the ancient spiritual power was politically annulled, the dissolution of European order followed spontaneously from the principle of liberty of conscience; and the most natural. papal function was at an end. Till the new social organization shall show us the law by which the nations shall become once more connected, the metaphysical notions of national isolation, and therefore of mutual non-intervention, must prevail; and they will be regarded as absolute till it appears how they defeat their own end. As all attempts at European co-ordination must otherwise be directed by the ancient system, we owe to the doctrine of national independence our rescue from the monstrous arrangement of the most civilized nations being politically subordinated to the least advanced, because the latter were least changed from their ancient state, and would be sure therefore to be placed at the head of such an association. But, if such a doctrine were more than provisional, the nations would sink below their state in the Middle Ages; and at the very time when they are marked out, by an ever INCONSISTENCY OF THE METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINE. 157 growing resemblance, for an association more extensive, and, at the same time more regular, than that which was proposed by the old catholic and feudal system. It is clear that when the dogma of national isolation has fulfilled its function of separating the nations, in order to a preparation for a new union, its further action must be as purely anarchical as that of its predecessors. A brief notice of the logical inconsistency of the revolutionary doctrine will conclude our preliminary review of it. This inconsistency is more radical and Inconsistency of the Meta physical doc trine. more manifest than in the case of the retrograde or theological doctrine; but it does not imply so utter a condemnation; not only on account of its recent formation, but because such a vice does not prevent its fulfilling its critical office. Notwithstanding profound differences, the adversaries of the old polity found no difficulty in uniting for successive partial demolitions about which they were agreed, postponing till their period of success their contests about the ulterior developments of their doctrine; a course which would be impossible in the case of any organic operation, in which each part must be considered in its relation to the whole. Thus far only, however, can the inconsistency be tolerated. When once the whole of any doctrine becomes hostile to its original purposes, it is condemned: and this is true of the metaphysical doctrine, which at once opposes the progress it professed to aid, and sustains the foundations of the political system it proposed to destroy. Its culminating point was at the most marked period of the first French Revolution, when it was, by an unavoidable illusion, taken to be the principle of social reorganization. It was then seen in its best aspect of consistency and power; and then it was that, the ancient system being disposed of, its vices became apparent. It showed itself hostile to all social reorganization, and became actually retrograde in its character by setting itself up in violent opposition to the movement of modern civilization. For one illustration, look at the strange meta- Notion of a physical notion of a supposed state of nature, which was to be the primitive and invariable type of state of Nature. every social state. This doctrine is not to be attri |