decreed nor legalised, until it attains as reasonable a condition as we
can hope for in our days."

The "idealist" Proudhon was convinced that the political constitution
had been invented for want of a social organisation "immanent in
humanity." He took the pains to "discover" this latter, and having
discovered it, he could not see what further _raison d'etre_ there was
for the political constitution. The "materialist" Bakounine has no
"social organisation" of his own make. "The most profound and rational
science," he says, "cannot divine the future forms of social life."[41]
This science must be content to distinguish the "living" social forms
from those that owe their origin to the "petrifying" action of the
State, and to condemn these latter. Is not this the old Proudhonian
antithesis of the social organisation "immanent in humanity," and of the
political constitution "invented" exclusively in the interests of
"order?" Is not the only difference that the "materialist" transforms
the Utopian programme of the "idealist," into something even more
Utopian, more nebulous, more absurd?

"To believe that the marvellous scheme of the universe is due to chance,
is to imagine that by throwing about a sufficient number of printers'
characters at hazard, we might write the Iliad." So reasoned the Deists
of the 18th century in refuting the Atheists. The latter replied that in
this case everything was a question of time, and that by throwing about
the letters an infinite number of times, we must certainly, at some
period, make them arrange themselves in the required sequence.
Discussions of this kind were to the taste of the 18th century, and we
should be wrong to make too much fun of them now-a-days. But it would
seem that Bakounine took the Atheist argument of the good old times
quite seriously, and used it in order to make himself a "programme."
Destroy what exists; if only you do this often enough you are bound at
last to produce a social organisation, approaching at any rate the
organisation you "dream" of. All will go well when once the revolution
has come to stay. Is not this sufficiently "materialist?" If you think
it is not, you are a metaphysician, "dreaming" of the impossible!

The Proudhonian antithesis of the "social organisation" and the
"political constitution" reappears "living" and in its entirety in what
Bakounine is for ever reiterating as to the "social revolution" on the
one hand, and the "political revoluti