deas cognate to a circle of ideas are assimilated
or assimilable; ideas too alien, though you shout them in the ear,
thrust them in the face, remain foreign and incomprehensible.

The early Socialists, arriving at last at their Great Idea, after
toilsome questionings, after debates, disputations, studies, trials,
_saw_, and instantly couldn't understand those others who did not see;
they failed altogether to realize the leaps they had made, the
brilliant omissions they had achieved, the difficulties they had
evaded to get to this magnificent conception. I suppose such
impatience is as natural and understandable as it is unfortunate. None
of us escape it. Much of this early Socialism is as unreal as
mathematics, has much the same relation to truth as the abstract
absolute process of calculation has to concrete individual things;
much of it more than justifies altogether that "black or white" method
of criticism of which I wrote in the preceding chapter. They were as
downright and unconsidering, as little capable of the reasoned middle
attitude. Proudhon, perceiving that the world was obsessed by a
misconception of the scope of property whereby the many were enslaved
to the few, went off at a tangent to the announcement that "Property
is Robbery," an exaggeration that, as I have already shown, still
haunts Socialist discussion. The ultimate factor of all human affairs,
the psychological factor, was disregarded. Like the classic
mathematical problem, early Socialism was always "neglecting the
weight of the elephant"--or some other--from the practical point of
view--equally essential factor. This was, perhaps, an unavoidable
stage. It is probable that by no other means than such exaggeration
and partial statement could Socialism have got itself begun. The world
of 1830 was fatally wrong in its ideas of property; early Socialism
rose up and gave those ideas a flat, extreme, outrageous
contradiction. After that analysis and discussion became possible.

The early Socialist literature teems with rash, suggestive schemes. It
has the fertility, the confusion, the hopefulness, the promise of
glowing youth. It is a quarry of ideas, a mine of crude expedients, a
fountain of emotions. The abolition of money, the substitution of
Labour Notes, the possibility, justice and advantage of equalizing
upon a time-basis the remuneration of the worker, the relation of the
new community to the old family, a hundred such topics were
ventilated