vary according to each founder of a school, and therefore with each
one, the variety of absolute truth, reason and justice is dependent,
in turn, upon the subjective temperament of that founder, his
conditions of life, the extent of his knowledge and mental discipline,
so that in this conflict of absolute truths there is no possible
solution save that they rub each other smooth by mutual contact. Hence
nothing could result from it except a sort of eclectic, average
socialism, which is, as a matter of fact, up to the present, the
prevailing notion in the minds of the great majority of socialist
agitators in France and England--a mixture admitting of manifold
shades, of a few notable critical utterances, economic teachings and
pictures of a future state of society by leaders of different sects, a
mixture which flows all the easier in proportion as the sharp precise
corners are rubbed off the separate notions in the stream of debates,
just as pebbles become round in a brook.

In order that a science can be made out of socialism it is first
necessary that it be placed on a sound basis.

Meanwhile, close to and just after the French philosophy of the
eighteenth century, the new German philosophy arose and culminated in
Hegel. Its greatest service was the restoration of the dialectic as
the highest form of thought. The old Greek philosophers were all
natural dialecticians, and the most universal intellect among them,
Aristotle, was already the discoverer of the essential forms of
dialectic thought. On the other hand, subsequent philosophy although
in it there were brilliant exponents of the dialectic (e.g. Descartes
and Spinoza), was more and more involved in the so-called metaphysical
mode of thought, chiefly owing to English influence which completely
mastered the French philosophers, at least of the eighteenth century.
Outside of the strict frontiers of philosophy, masterpieces of the
dialectic might be found occasionally of which I can only recall
"Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot, and the treatise upon the origin of
human inequality by Rousseau.

We now give briefly the essential features of the two modes of
thought: we will return to them more fully later.

If we examine nature, the history of man or our own intellectual
activities, we have presented to us an endless coil of interrelations
and changes in which nothing is constant whatever be its nature, time
or position, but every thing is in motion, suffers change, and