ortunity, have failed us for
proceeding in the manner of La Place and of Say, we cannot refuse to
believe that the form which we have adopted has, also, its modest
utility. It appears to us especially well suited to the wants of the
age, to the hurried moments which it can consecrate to study.

A treatise has, doubtless, an incontestable superiority; but upon
condition that it be read, meditated upon, searched into. It addresses
itself to a select public only. Its mission is, at first, to fix, and
afterwards to enlarge, the circle of acquired knowledge.

The refutation of vulgar prejudices could not carry with it this high
bearing. It aspires only to disencumber the route before the march of
truth, to prepare the mind, to reform public opinion, to blunt
dangerous tools in improper hands. It is in social economy above all,
that these hand-to-hand struggles, these constantly recurring combats
with popular errors, have a true practical utility.

We might arrange the sciences under two classes. The one, strictly,
can be known to philosophers only. They are those whose application
demands a special occupation. The public profit by their labor,
despite their ignorance of them. They do not enjoy the use of a watch
the less, because they do not understand mechanics and astronomy. They
are not the less carried along by the locomotive and the steamboat
through their faith in the engineer and the pilot. We walk according
to the laws of equilibrium without being acquainted with them.

But there are sciences which exercise upon the public an influence
proportionate with the light of the public itself, not from knowledge
accumulated in a few exceptional heads, but from that which is
diffused through the general understanding. Such are morals, hygiene,
social economy, and in countries which men belong to themselves,
politics. It is of these sciences, above all, that Bentham might have
said: "That which spreads them is worth more than that which advances
them." Of what consequence is it that a great man, a God even, should
have promulgated moral laws, so long as men, imbued with false
notions, take virtues for vices, and vices for virtues? Of what value
is it that Smith, Say, and, according to Chamans, economists of all
schools, have proclaimed the superiority of liberty to restraint in
commercial transactions, if those who make the laws and those for
whom the laws are made, are convinced to the contrary.

These sciences, which ar