Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/196

wise in each and all of the elements which constitute it; and they thereby proclaim the sanctity and divinity of the passions. For this reason, all the socialist schools, some implicitly and others explicitly, declare the divinity and sanctity of the passions. From this admission must result the explicit condemnation of all repressive and penal systems, and above all the condemnation of virtue, whose function is to arrest the progress of the passions, to restrain their explosion, and repress their efforts. All these consequences of anterior principles, and which in their turn become principles leading to more remote consequences, are both taught and announced, with a greater or less degree of cynicism, by all the socialist schools, among which are conspicuous those of St. Simon and of Fourrier, which shine with a greater brilliancy than the others, like two suns in a starry sky. This is what is meant by the St. Simonian theory respecting the restoration of woman and the pacification of the flesh. This is the signification of Fourrier's doctrine of attraction. Fourrier says: "Duty proceeds from man (understood to mean society) and attraction comes from God." Madam de Coeslin, as quoted by Mr. Louis Raybaud, in his Reflections upon Cotemporaneous Reformers, has expressed the same thought with greater precision, in these words: "The passions are of divine, the virtues of human institution;" which means, according to the assumed principles of the school, that the virtues are pernicious and the passions are salutary. For this reason the supreme end of socialism is to create a new social order, in which the passions will have free scope, and which is to be inaugurated by the destruction of the political, religious, and social institutions which restrain them. The golden era