believe in the very principles of morality, a very different thing. She has no longer moral intelligence or conscience, she has almost lost the idea of morals itself; as a result of continual criticism we have come to this melancholy conclusion: that right and wrong, between which we formerly thought we were able to distinguish dogmatically, are now vague and indeterminate conventional terms; that all these words. Right, Duty, Morality, Virtue, etc., of which the pulpit and the school talk so much, serve to cover nothing but pure hypotheses, vain Utopias, and unprovable prejudices; that thus ordinary social behaviour, which is apparently governed by some sort of human respect or by convention, is in reality arbitrary."[1]
However, he did not think that contemporary society was mortally wounded; he believed that since the Revolution, humanity had acquired an idea of Justice which was sufficiently clear to enable it to triumph over temporary lapses; by this conception of the future he separated himself completely from what was to become the most fundamental idea of contemporary official Socialism, which sneers at morality. "This juridical faith … this science of right and duty, which we seek everywhere in vain, that the Church has never possessed, and without which it is impossible for us to live, I say that the Revolution created all its principles; that these principles, unknown to us, rule and uphold us, but while at the bottom of our hearts affirming them, we shrink from them through prejudice, and it is this infidelity to ourselves that makes our moral poverty and servitude."[2] He
- ↑ Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans l'eglise vol. i. p. 70.
- ↑ Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 74. By juridical faith Proudhon here understands a triple faith, which dominates the family, contracts, and political relations. The first is "the conception of the mutual dignity (of husband and wife) which, raising them above the level of the senses, renders them more sacred to the other even than dear, and makes their fertile community a religion for them, sweeter than love itself"—the second "raising the mind above egoistical appetites, is made happier
