they merit some attention.

St. Simonism offered itself as a system of religion, of philosophy, and of
government, which should be the perfect cure of all the evils which
existed. The source of these evils St. Simon conceived to be the want of
social unity; individualism, selfishness, to be the cause of virtual
anarchy. He considered that philosophy and religion had striven in vain to
remedy the evil, because they had not made the spiritual to bear upon the
material interests of mankind. This, which was the true remedy, he
proposed to discover historically.

Borrowing the thought of the German philosophers, he sought it in the
elements which are to operate on human nature in the progress of its
development. The mode of development by which society advances to
perfection he found in a supposed law, that society shows two great
epochs, which in long cycles alternate,--the organic and the critical; the
former, where the individual is obedient to the purpose of the society;
the second, where the individual rises against it. He found two instances
of them in the ancient and modern world respectively, viz. in the ancient
pagan period and its disruption; and again in the Catholic centralization
of the middle ages, and the disorganization which succeeded from the time
of the Reformation to the French revolution. He considered himself to be
raised up to announce the dawn of the third organic period, the world's
millennium, a new epoch, and a new religion. It was to be the realisation
of the fraternity, which the great moral teachers of the world had
promised and prepared. This religion consisted in raising the industrial
classes, by a scheme which it is irrelevant to our purpose to explain.

Contemporaneously with this socialist system was that of Fourier,(872)
which, though presented more as a scheme of social amelioration, and less
as a religion, implied the same abnegation of Christianity. Starting from
an avowedly pantheistic view of philosophy, the author of it gradually
passed through the sciences, until he arrived at man, and reached the
study of human history and constitutions. Exaggerating the good elements
of human nature, and ignoring the necessity for any other than a social
power to amend the heart, he traced the source of evil to social
competition, and proposed to rearrange society on the principle of
substituting co-partnership for competition.(873) The two ideas
accordingly which these speculations introduced