THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 127
is neither absolute reason, pure and virginal, nor the common reason of men living and active in the different centuries, but a reason quite apart, the reason of society personified, of the subject humanity, which, under the pen of M. Proudhon, appears sometimes also as “social genius,” “general reason,” and in the last place as “human reason.” This reason dressed up under so many names, is, however, every instant recognised as the in- dividual reason of M. Proudhon, with his good and bad side, his antidotes and his problems.
’“Human reason does not create the truth,” hidden in the profundity of absolute, eternal reason. It can only unveil it. But the truths which it has unveiled up to the present are incomplete, insufficient and therefore con- tradictory. Then, the economic categories, being them- selves discovered truths, revealed by human reason, by social genius, are equally incomplete and enclose the germ of contradiction. Before M. Proudhon social genius has seen only the antagonistic elements and not the synthetic formula, both simultaneously hidden in ab- solute reason. Economic relations causing to be realised on earth only these insufficient truths, these incomplete categories, these contradictory notions, are then con- tradictory in themselves and present the two sides, of which one is good, the other evil.
To find the complete truth, the notion in all its pleni- tude, the synthetic formula, which will annihilate the contradiction—that is the problem of social genius. That is why still, in the illusion of M. Proudhon, the same social genius has been driven from one category to the other without having yet come, with all the battery of its categories, to drag from God, from absolute reason, a synthetic formula.
