Thus, from the viewpoint of our present study, we may divide ethics into living and dead. Living ethics arise from needs and desires, stimulate an imaginative construction that becomes fixed in actions, habits and laws; they offer to men a concrete, positive ideal which, under various and often contrary aspects, is always happiness. The lifeless ethics, from which invention has withdrawn, arise from reflection upon, and the rational codification of, living ethics. Stored away in the writings of philosophers, they remain theoretical, speculative, without appreciable influence on the masses, mere material for dissertation and commentary.
In proportion as we recede from distant origins the light grows, and invention in the social and moral order becomes manifest as the work of two principal categories of minds—the fantastic, the positive. The former, purely imaginative beings, visionaries, utopians, are closely related to poets and artists. The latter, practical creators or reformers, capable of organizing, belong to the family of inventors in the industrial-commercial-mechanical order.
I
The chimerical form of imagination, applied to the social sciences, is the one that, taking account neither of the external determinism nor of practical requirements, spreads out freely. Such are the creators of ideal republics, seeking for a lost or to-be-discovered-in-the-future golden age, constructing, as their fancy pleases, human societies in their large outlines and in their details. They are social novelists, who bear the same relation to sociologists that poets do to critics. Their dreams, subjected merely to the conditions of an inner logic, have lived only within themselves, an ideal life, without ever passing through the test of application. It is the creative imagination in its unconscious form, restrained to its first phase.
Nothing is better known than their names and their works: The Republic of Plato, Thomas More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, Harrington's Oceana, Fenelon's Salente, etc.[141] However idealistic they may be, one could easily show that all the materials of their ideal are taken from the surrounding reality, they bear the stamp of the milieu, be it Greek, English, Christian, etc., in which they lived, and it should not be forgotten that in the Utopians everything is not chimerical—some have been revealers, others have acted as stimuli or ferments. True to its mission, which is to make innovations, the constructive imagination is a spur that arouses; it hinders social routine and prevents stagnation.
Among the creators of ideal societies there is one, almost contemporary, who would deserve a study of individual psychology—Ch. Fourier. If it is a question merely of fertility in pure construction, I doubt whether we could find one superior to him—he is equal to the highest, with the special characteristic of being at the same time exuberant to delirium and exact in details to the least minutiæ. He is such a fine type of the imaginative intellect that he deserves that we stop a moment.
His cosmogony seems the work of an omnipotent demiurge fashioning the universe at will. His conception of the future world with its "counter-cast" creations, where the present ugliness and troubles of animal reign become changed into their opposites, where there will be "anti-lions," "anti-crocodiles," "anti-whales," etc., is one example of hundreds showing his inexhaustible richness in fantastic visions: the work of an imagination that is hot and overflowing, with no rational preoccupation.
On the other hand, his psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries. Assuming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he assigns it first a period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period of completion, 9,000 years; and then a period of "descending subversion," whose first stage is 27,000 years, and the second 4,000 years—a total of 81,000 years. This form of imagination is already known to us.[142]
The principal part of his psychology, the theory of the emotions, questionable in many respects, is relatively rational. But in the construction of human society, the duality of his imagination—powerful and minute—reappears. We know his methodical organization: the group, composed of seven to nine persons; the series, comprising twenty-four to thirty-two groups; a phalanx that includes eighteen groups, constituting the phalanstery; the small city, a general center of phalanges; the provincial city, the imperial capital, the universal metropolis. He has a passion for classification and ordering; "his phalanstery works like a clock."
This rare imaginative type well deserved a few remarks, because of its mixture of apparent exactness and a natural, unconscious utopianism and extravagance. For, beneath all these pulsating inventions of precise, petty details, the foundation is none the less a purely speculative construction of the mind. Let us add an incredible abuse of analogy, that chief intellectual instrument of invention, of which only the reading of his books can give an idea.[143] Heinrich Heine said of Michelet, "He has a Hindoo imagination." The term would apply still better to Fourier, in whom coexist unchecked profusion of images and the taste for numerical accumulations. People have tried to explain this abundance of figures and calculation as a professional habit—he was for a long time a bookkeeper or cashier, always an excellent accountant. But this is taking the effect for cause. This dualism existed in the very nature of his mind, and he took advantage of it in his calling. The study of the numerical imagination[144] has shown how it is frequently met with among orientals, whose imaginative development is unquestioned, and we have seen why the idealistic imagination agrees so well with the indefinite series of numbers and makes use of it as a vehicle.