with him.

It is not enough, then, to say that we are distinguished from the
animals by reflection, unless we mean thereby the CONSTANT TENDENCY OF
OUR INSTINCT TO BECOME INTELLIGENCE. While man is governed by instinct,
he is unconscious of his acts. He never would deceive himself, and never
would be troubled by errors, evils, and disorder, if, like the animals,
instinct were his only guide. But the Creator has endowed us with
reflection, to the end that our instinct might become intelligence;
and since this reflection and resulting knowledge pass through various
stages, it happens that in the beginning our instinct is opposed, rather
than guided, by reflection; consequently, that our power of thought
leads us to act in opposition to our nature and our end; that, deceiving
ourselves, we do and suffer evil, until instinct which points us towards
good, and reflection which makes us stumble into evil, are replaced by
the science of good and evil, which invariably causes us to seek the one
and avoid the other.

Thus, evil--or error and its consequences--is the firstborn son of
the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection; good,
or truth, must inevitably be the second child. Or, to again employ the
figure, evil is the product of incest between adverse powers; good will
sooner or later be the legitimate child of their holy and mysterious
union.

Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind
comparisons. But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to
spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so
property is subsequent to communism. Communism--or association in a
simple form--is the necessary object and original aspiration of the
social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and
establishes itself. It is the first phase of human civilization. In this
state of society,--which the jurists have called NEGATIVE COMMUNISM--man
draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the
milk and flesh of animals. Little by little this communism--negative
as long as man does not produce--tends to become positive and organic
through the development of labor and industry. But it is then that the
sovereignty of thought, and the terrible faculty of reasoning logically
or illogically, teach man that, if equality is the sine qua non of
society, communism is the first species of slavery. To express this idea
by an Hegelian formula, I will say: