It is not enough, then, to say that we are distinguished from the animals by reflection, unless we mean thereby the CONSTANTTENDENCY OF OUR INSTINCT TO BECOME INTELLIGENCE.While man is governed by instinct, he is unconscious of his acts.He never would deceive himself, and never would be troubled by errors, evils, and disorder, if, like the animals, instinct were his only guide.But the Creator has endowed us with reflection, to the end that our instinct might become intelligence; and since this reflection and resulting knowledge pass through various stages, it happens that in the beginning our instinct is opposed, rather than guided, by reflection; consequently, that our power of thought leads us to act in opposition to our nature and our end;that, deceiving ourselves, we do and suffer evil, until instinct which points us towards good, and reflection which makes us stumble into evil, are replaced by the science of good and evil, which invariably causes us to seek the one and avoid the other.
Thus, evil--or error and its consequences--is the firstborn son of the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection;good, or truth, must inevitably be the second child.Or, to again employ the figure, evil is the product of incest between adverse powers; good will sooner or later be the legitimate child of their holy and mysterious union.
Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind comparisons.But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so property is subsequent to communism.Communism--or association in a simple form--is the necessary object and original aspiration of the social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and establishes itself.It is the first phase of human civilization.In this state of society,--which the jurists have called NEGATIVE COMMUNISM--man draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the milk and flesh of animals.Little by little this communism--negative as long as man does not produce--tends to become positive and organic through the development of labor and industry.But it is then that the sovereignty of thought, and the terrible faculty of reasoning logically or illogically, teach man that, if equality is the sine qua non of society, communism is the first species of slavery.
To express this idea by an Hegelian formula, I will say:
Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term of social development,--the THESIS; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term,--the ANTITHESIS.
When we have discovered the third term, the SYNTHESIS, we shall have the required solution.Now, this synthesis necessarily results from the correction of the thesis by the antithesis.Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to sociability.The union of the two remainders will give us the true form of human association.
% 2.--Characteristics of Communism and of Property.
I.I ought not to conceal the fact that property and communism have been considered always the only possible forms of society.
This deplorable error has been the life of property.The disadvantages of communism are so obvious that its critics never have needed to employ much eloquence to thoroughly disgust men with it.The irreparability of the injustice which it causes, the violence which it does to attractions and repulsions, the yoke of iron which it fastens upon the will, the moral torture to which it subjects the conscience, the debilitating effect which it has upon society; and, to sum it all up, the pious and stupid uniformity which it enforces upon the free, active, reasoning, unsubmissive personality of man, have shocked common sense, and condemned communism by an irrevocable decree.
The authorities and examples cited in its favor disprove it.The communistic republic of Plato involved slavery; that of Lycurgus employed Helots, whose duty it was to produce for their masters, thus enabling the latter to devote themselves exclusively to athletic sports and to war.Even J.J.Rousseau--confounding communism and equality--has said somewhere that, without slavery, he did not think equality of conditions possible.The communities of the early Church did not last the first century out, and soon degenerated into monasteries.In those of the Jesuits of Paraguay, the condition of the blacks is said by all travellers to be as miserable as that of slaves; and it is a fact that the good Fathers were obliged to surround themselves with ditches and walls to prevent their new converts from escaping.The followers of Baboeuf--guided by a lofty horror of property rather than by any definite belief--were ruined by exaggeration of their principles; the St.Simonians, lumping communism and inequality, passed away like a masquerade.The greatest danger to which society is exposed to-day is that of another shipwreck on this rock.
Singularly enough, systematic communism--the deliberate negation of property--is conceived under the direct influence of the proprietary prejudice; and property is the basis of all communistic theories.
The members of a community, it is true, have no private property;but the community is proprietor, and proprietor not only of the goods, but of the persons and wills.In consequence of this principle of absolute property, labor, which should be only a condition imposed upon man by Nature, becomes in all communities a human commandment, and therefore odious.Passive obedience, irreconcilable with a reflecting will, is strictly enforced.
