as merely the sentimental
expression of a humanitarianism as noble as it was neglectful of the
most elementary principles of exact science, it was altogether natural
for its partisans to give rein to the impetuosity of their generous
natures both in their vehement protests against social injustices and in
their reveries and day-dreams of a better world, to which the
imagination strove to give precise contours, as witness all the utopias
from the REPUBLIC of Plato to the LOOKING BACKWARD of Bellamy.

It is easy to understand what opportunities these constructions afforded
to criticism. The latter was false in part, moreover, because it was the
offspring of the habits of thought peculiar to the modern world, and
which will change with the change in the environment, but it was well
founded in part also because the enormous complexity of social phenomena
makes it impossible to prophesy in regard to all the details of a social
organization which will differ from ours more profoundly than the
present society differs from that of the Middle Ages, because the
bourgeois world has retained the same foundation, individualism, as the
society which preceded it, while the socialist world will have a
fundamentally different polarization.

These prophetic constructions of a new social order are, moreover, the
natural product of that artificiality in politics and sociology, with
which the most orthodox individualists are equally deeply imbued,
individualists who imagine, as Spencer has remarked, that human society
is like a piece of dough to which the law can give one form rather than
another, without taking into account the organic and psychical, ethical
and historical qualities, tendencies and aptitudes of the different
peoples.

Sentimental socialism has furnished some attempts at utopian
construction, but the modern world of politics has presented and does
present still more of them with the ridiculous and chaotic mess of laws
and codes which surround every man from his birth to his death, and even
before he is born and after he is dead, in an inextricable network of
codes, laws, decrees and regulations which stifle him like the silk-worm
in the cocoon.

And every day, experience shows us that our legislators, imbued with
this political and social artificiality, do nothing but copy the laws of
the most dissimilar peoples, according as the fashion comes from Paris
or Berlin,--instead of carefully studying the facts of actual life