declare
that they are valueless or even harmful in life. We read Strauss's
_Life of Jesus_, and put it down perhaps with the conviction that the
usually recognised sources of inspired information as to revealed
religion and the divine mission of Christianity are an unskilful
compilation of purely apocryphal documents; but are we on that account
to deny the importance of Judaism and Christianity in social progress
and ethics? Or again, I may read E. B. Tyler's _Primitive Culture_ and
see the ideas of the soul and God arise from purely natural and (for
the most part) physiological origins, just as we can trace the
development of the skilful hand of Raphael or Liszt from the
fore-limbs of an ape; but am I from that to conclude that the idea of
religion is harmful to society? It is just the same with the ideas of
the State and Property. Modern science has shown us beyond dispute the
purely historical origin of both these forms of social life; and both
are, at least as we find them to-day, comparatively recent features of
human society. This, of course, settles the question as to the State
and Property being inviolable, or being necessary features of human
society from everlasting to everlasting; but the further question as
to how far these forms are advantages and _relatively_ necessary for
society in general, or for a certain society, has nothing to do with
the above, and cannot be answered by the help of a simple logical
formula. But though this fact seems so clear to us, it is even to-day
not by any means clear to a great portion of mankind. And how much
less clear it must have been to thinkers at the beginning of this
century when thought was still firmly moulded upon the conception of
the Absolute. To them there could only be either absolute Being or
absolute Not-Being; and as soon as ever critical philosophy destroyed
the idea of the "sacredness" of the institutions referred to
(Property and the State), it was almost unavoidable that it should
declare them to be "unholy," _i. e._, radically bad and harmful. The
logic which underlies this process of thought is similar to that which
concludes that if a thing is not white it must be black. But it cannot
be denied that just at this time--during the celebrated _dix ans_
after the Revolution of July--many circumstances seemed positively to
favour such an inference.

Not only were economic conditions unsatisfactory (though pauperism
alone will never produce Anarchism), but