e, and determines it in the direction of the general
interest independently of all consideration of self-interest.

And so the man, who had put away from himself everything of an
absolute and _a priori_ nature because he declared a purely empirical
foundation of social science to be the source of all immorality,
arrived at the assumption of an innate, immanent justice as the first
principle of society which he, with the arbitrariness of a catechism
writer, declared to be "the first and most essential of our faculties;
a sovereign faculty which, by that very fact, is the most difficult to
know, the faculty of feeling and affirming our dignity, and
consequently of wishing it and defending it as well in the person of
others as in our own person."

As Proudhon, in spite of the fact that he was always opposing
Utopianism, nevertheless fell into the chief error of the Utopians,
so, too, finally he shared the destiny of Auguste Comte, upon whom
during his life he had rather looked down. Both had started with a
sworn antagonism to every speculative foundation of social philosophy,
and both finally adopted a _deus ex machina_ in order to preserve the
world that was falling into individual pieces before them from a
complete atomisation. With Comte it is called "love," with Proudhon
"justice." The distinction between the two is somewhat childish. Both
perceived the standpoint of evolution, the mechanical conception which
overcomes all deviations, without assigning to it the part which it
deserves. One may safely say that if Proudhon had been brought into
connection with the doctrine of evolution, he would have been one of
the leading sociologists. He had an infinitely keen sense of the most
secret motions of the social soul, but he believed that he might not
approach it lovingly in its nudity of nature, and therefore degraded
it to a Platonic idea, after having affirmed its utmost reality. This
was an action like that of Kronos, the curse of which never departed
from his thought.

To this was added a very scanty and transitory acquaintance with
political economy which allowed the practicability of his ideas to
appear to him in the easiest light, but which, when he was opposed to
one so thoroughly acquainted with it as Karl Marx, placed him in the
most piteous position.

One of the commonest reproaches which is made against Proudhon, and
which is partly a personal one, refers to his attitude towards
Napoleon III. In the little