128 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
“At first society (social genius) presents a first fact, emits a hypothesis....a true contradiction, of which the antagonistic results unfold themselves in the social economy in the same manner as the consequences would have been deduced in the mind, in such wise that the industrial movement, following in all the deductions of ideas, divides into a double current, the one of useful effects, the other of subversive results. To constitute harmoniously this two-faced principle and solve this contradiction, society develops a second, which will very soon be followed by a third; and such will be the progress of social genius until, having exhausted all its contra- dictions—I suppose, but that is not proved, that there is a finality to the contradiction in humanity—it returns, at a bound, upon all its anterior positions, and in a single formula solves all its problems.” (Vol. I., p. 135.)
Just as before the antithesis was changed into the antidote, so now the thesis becomes the hypothesis. This change of terms on the part of M. Proudhon can no longer astonish us. Human reason which is nothing less than pure, having only incomplete views, meets at each step fresh problems to solve. Each new thesis which it discovers in absolute reason, and which is the negation of the first thesis, becomes for it a synthesis, which it naively accepts as the solution of the problem in question. It is thus that this reason strives with ever new con- tradictions, until finding itself as the end of contra- dictions it perceives that all its theses and syntheses are only contradictory hypotheses. In its perplexity “human reason, the social genius, returns at a bound upon all its anterior positions, and in a single formula solves all its problems.” This unique formula, we may say in passing, constitutes the real discovery of M. Proudhon. It is constituted value.
