suffer evil, until instinct which points us towards good, and reflection which makes us stumble into evil, are replaced by the science of good and evil, which invariably causes us to seek the one and avoid the other.
Thus, evil—or error and its consequences—is the firstborn son of the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection; good, or truth, must inevitably be the second child. Or, to again employ the figure, evil is the product of incest between adverse powers; good will sooner or later be the legitimate child of their holy and mysterious union.
Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind comparisons. But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so property is subsequent to communism. Communism—or association in a simple form—is the necessary object and original aspiration of the social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and establishes itself. It is the first phase of human civilization. In this state of society,—which the jurists have called negative communism—man draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the milk and flesh of animals. Little by little this communism—negative as long as man does not produce—tends to become positive and organic through the development of labor and industry. But it is then that the sovereignty of thought, and the terrible faculty of reasoning logically or illogically, teach man that, if equality is the sine qua non of society, communism is the first species of slavery.
To express this idea by an Hegelian formula, I will say:
Communism—the first expression of the social nature—is the first term of social development —the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term,—the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis,
