le. The
malcontents condemned this same constitution, making use of the same
abstraction. And since this abstraction, being completely empty, left,
as we have said, full room for every gratuitous hypothesis and the
logical consequences resulting therefrom, the "scientific" mission of
these reformers assumed the appearance of a geometrical problem; given a
certain nature, find what structure of society best corresponds with it.
So Morelly complains bitterly because "our old teachers" failed to
attempt the solution of "this excellent problem"--"to find the condition
in which it should be almost impossible for men to be depraved, or
wicked, or at any rate, _minima de malis_." We have already seen that
for Morelly human nature was "one, constant, invariable."

We now know what was the "scientific" method of the Utopians. Before we
leave them let us remind the reader that in human nature, an extremely
thin and therefore not very satisfying abstraction, the Utopians really
appealed, not to human nature in general, but to the idealised nature of
the men of their own day, belonging to the class whose social tendencies
they represented. The social reality, therefore, inevitably appears in
the words of the Utopians, but the Utopians were unconscious of this.
They saw this reality only across an abstraction which, thin as it was,
was by no means translucent.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See "Code de la Nature," Paris, 1841. Villegardelle's edition, Note
to p. 66.

[2] "The floating islands or the Basiliades of the celebrated Pelpai,
translated from the Indian."

CHAPTER II

THE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM

The great idealistic philosophers of Germany, Schelling and Hegel,
understood the insufficiency of the human nature point of view. Hegel,
in his "Philosophy of History," makes fun of the Utopian bourgeoisie in
search of the best of constitutions. German Idealism conceived history
as a process subject to law, and sought the motive-power of the
historical movement _outside the nature of man_. This was a great step
towards the truth. But the Idealists saw this motive-power in the
absolute idea, in the "Weltgeist;" and as their absolute idea was only
an abstraction of "our process of thinking," in their philosophical
speculation upon history, they reintroduced the old love of the
Materialist philosophers--human nature--but dressed in robes worthy of
the respectable and austere society of German thinkers. Drive nature