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Already the doors are giving way, the hinges creak; and while Général Marchand and préfet Fourier with their small body of faithful soldiers rush precipitately across the deserted streets of the town, Colonel Roussille makes ready to open the Gate of Bonne to the Emperor and to his soldiers. "My regiment was prepared to turn against me," he says to his men, "but I shall not turn against them."
Whatever importance these reflections may possess, I hasten to add that, instead of the arguments of his predecessors, which have no real value, Fourier has substituted proofs, demonstrations; and we know what meaning such terms convey to the Academy of Sciences.
"Surely, M. Fourier," he said, "you don't mean to suggest that Grenoble is going to turn traitor to the King?" But M. le préfet apparently had meant to suggest it. "Alas, M. le Comte!" he said, "we must always bear in mind that the whole of the Dauphiné has remained throughout a bed of Bonapartism." "But in that case .
Plato, Rousseau, Fourier, columns of aluminium, are only fit for sparrows and not for human society. But, now that we are all at last preparing to act, a new form of social organisation is essential. In order to avoid further uncertainty, I propose my own system of world-organisation. Here it is." He tapped the notebook.
Now Fourier has established, that if the calorific rays emitted were equally intense in all directions, if the intensity did not vary proportionally to the sine of the angle of emission, the temperature of a body situated in the enclosure would depend on the place which it would occupy there: that the temperature of boiling water or of melting iron, for example, would exist in certain points of a hollow envelop of glass!
They had fallen unwittingly, it may be said, on ideas that coincided with those of Charles Fourier. There was an agreement between them, unknown at the start.
It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest, to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is so fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society. The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften.
"Town gossip!" reiterated M. Fourier, who seemed to be calling Heaven to witness this extraordinary levity, "town gossip, M. le Comte! .
All went on as the celebrated academician had said; only that every one knew with certainty that his vote had been for Fourier; and "the calculation of probabilities" was in no way necessary for arriving at this result.
Well, then, grant some centuries to this religion of science of whose sprouting there are signs upon all sides, and by-and-by the admirable ideas of some Fourier will be seen expanding and forming a new gospel, with desire serving as the lever to raise the world, work accepted by one and all, honoured and regulated as the very mechanism of natural and social life, and the passions of man excited, contented and utilised for human happiness!
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