modern Socialism has ceased to mix its conceptions with certain innocent reforms of a sentimental order mentioned by a few Christian reformers. But this last—we must point out—had had already been done by Godwin, Fourier, and Robert Owen. As to centralisation and the cult of authority and discipline, which humanity owes to theocracy and to Imperial Roman law—all survivals of an obscure past—these survivals are still retained by many modern Socialists, who consequently have not yet reached the level of their two predecessors, Godwin and Proudhon.
It would be difficult to give here an adequate idea of the influence which reaction, having become supreme after the Great French Revolution, exercised upon the development of science.[1] Suffice it to remark that what modern science is so proud of to-day was already indicated, and often more than indicated—it was sometimes put forth in a definite scientific form—towards the end of the eighteenth century. The mechanical theory of heat; the indestructibility of movement (preservation of energy); the variability of species by the direct influence of surroundings; physiological psychology; the anthropologic comprehension of history, of religions, and of legislation; the laws of development of thought—in a word, the whole mechanical conception and synthetic philosophy (a philosophy that discusses the foundations of all physical, chemical, vital, and social phenomena as a whole) were already sketched and partly elaborated in the eighteenth century.
But when the reactionaries had got the upper hand, after the defeat of the Great French Revolution, for fully half a century, they stifled all these discoveries. Reactionary scientists represented them as "unscientific." On the pretext of "first studying facts" and accumulating "materials" for science in scientific societies, they even went so far as to repudiate any research which was not merely mensuration. Such remarkable discoveries as the elder Séguin's and, later on, Joule's determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat (the quantity of mechanical friction necessary in order to obtain a certain quantity of heat) were repudiated by these keepers of tradition. Even the Royal Society of Great Britain, which is the English Academy of Science, refused to print Joule’s work, finding it "unscientific." As to
- ↑ I have discussed this question to some extent in a lecture delivered in England: "The Development of Science during the Nineteenth Century."
