The Modern Regime, vol 2 | Page 6

literature;
who breathed it in his youth with the fervid and sacred enthusiasm of a
poet seeing the world grow brighter and intelligible to him, and who, at
the age of twenty- five, demanded of it a method and introduced this
into criticism and psychology in order to give these new life - the
mechanical equivalent of heat, natural selection, spectroscopic analysis,
the theory of the microbes, recent discoveries in physics and the
constitution of matter, research into historic origins, psychological
explanation of texts, extension of oriental researches, discoveries of
prehistoric conditions, comparative study of barbaric communities -
every grand idea of the century to which he has himself contributed, all
those by which science embraces a larger and larger portion of the
universe, he saw them containing the same essence; all combining to
change the conception of the world and substitute another, coherent and
logical in the best minds, but then confused and disfigured as it slowly
descends to the level of the crowd. - He would have described this
decent, the gradual diffusion, the growing power of the new Idea, the
active ferment which it contains after the manner of a dogma,
beneficent or pernicious according to the minds in which it lodges,
capable of arming men and of driving them on to pure destruction when
not fully comprehended, and capable of reorganizing them if they can
grasp its veritable meaning.

Its first effects are simply destructive, for, through Darwinism, through
experimental psychology, through the physiology of the brain, through
biblical exegesis, through the comparative study of savage
communities and their moral systems, the new concepts at first shocks
the religious idea which it tends to replace; even, with the half-
cultivated and in the minds of novices, it tends to pure negation, to
hostility against existing religions. To every social gathering around the
religious idea that explains and sustains it, what a disturbance in the
secular system formed by the co-ordination and mutual adaptation of
laws, customs, morality, and institutions! What a rupture of the inward
equilibrium which maintains man passive and tranquil! The consequent
mental agitation will lead to agitation, impulsion, ambitions, lassitude,
despondency, and disorder in all the sentiments which had thus far
maintained every species of society, the family, the commune, the
Church, free association and the State! - Now, along with the
immediate effects of science on the intellectual habits of men consider
the effects of its application to their material condition; at first, their
increased well-being, their power increased, then the rupture of the ties
that bind them to their birthplace, the concentration of masses of
workmen in the towns to which they are attracted by great and rapid
industrial development, the influx of new ideas, of every species of
information, the gradual decline of the old hereditary prejudices of
caste and parish which act automatically as instincts, and are useful as
instincts to the small groups in which the individual is born and in
which he lives. How could such a profound change in the condition of
humanity fail to undermine everywhere the order of things which group
men together? Why should not the new milieu at once attack all ancient
forms of society? For, at the moment of its establishment, there exists
in Europe a general form of society manifest through features in
common; a monarchy - hereditary royalty, dynastic but frequently
limited, at least in fact, - a privileged nobility performing military
service as a special function, a clergy organized as a Church,
proprietary and more or less privileged, local or special bodies also
proprietary - provinces, communes, universities, brotherhoods,
corporations - laws and customs which base the family on paternal
authority, perpetuating it on the natal soil and by social rank; in brief,
institutions which modern ideas disturb in every direction, the first

effect of which is, while developing the spirit of doubt and
investigation, to break down subordination to the king, to the
gentleman, to the noble, and, in general, to dissolve society founded on
heredity. Such phenomena are already observable everywhere, the ruin
of feeble corporations by the state, its constant tendency to interference,
to the absorption of every special service and the descent of power into
the hands of a numerical majority. - What plan, then, governs these
societies in the way of reorganization, and, since they all belong to a
common type, what are the common resources and difficulties of
adaptation? On what lines must the metamorphosis be effected in order
to arrive at a viable creations? And, abandoning the general problem in
order to return to contemporary France, grown up and organized under
our own eyes, how does the great modern event affect it? How does
"this common factor combine with special factors, permanent and
temporary," belong to our system? With the French, whose hereditary