126 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
anterior to active living men; that, further, these laws, these principles, these categories, had, from the beginning of time, slept “in the impersonal reason of humanity.” We have already seen that with these immutable and immovable eternities, there is no history; at the most it is only history in the idea, that is to say history which is reflected in the dialectical movement of pure reason. M. Proudhon, in saying that in the dialectical movement the ideas are no longer “differentiated,” has annulled both the shadow of movement and the movement of the shadows, by means of which we might at most have still created a simulacrum of history. In the place of that he imputes to history his own impotence, he takes from it all, even to the French language. “It is then not correct to say,” says M. Proudhon the philosopher, “that something happens, something is produced: in civilisation as in the universe everything exists, every- thing acts from eternity. J is thus with all social economy.” (Vol. II., p. 102.)
Such is the productive force of the contradictions which function and which make M. Proudhon function, that in wishing to explain history he is forced to deny it, that in wishing to explain the successive development of social relations he denies that anything can happen, and in wishing to explain production in all its phases, he denies that anything can be produced.
Thus for M. Proudhon, no more history, no more succession of ideas, and nevertheless his book still exists; and this book is precisely, according to his own expres- sion, “history according to the succession of ideas.’ How can we find a formula, as M. Proudhon is the man of formulas, by the aid of which we can leap at a single bound beyond all his contradictions ?
For that he has invented a new kind of reason which
