Preamble on systematic thoughtlessness

Aristotle, one of the most highly regarded of our sages, considered his own understanding to be woefully slight. His motto was ‘What do I know?’, which was probably the best thing he said. The moderns are not much inclined to modesty of that sort; yet are they wiser than Aristotle when it comes to social policy? No. The situation has not changed since classical times: there is still nothing to be found but poverty, fraud and revolutions. And judging by the storms that our modern philosophers have inflicted on the present generation, there can hardly ever have been a century in which Aristotle's motto was more needed.

They have all gone laughably wrong, because in every science they have overlooked the fundamental question, the one that is the pivot of the whole of that science. For example:

You authors of the inexact sciences claim to be working for the good of the whole human race. Do you think that the six hundred million barbarians and savages are not part of it? Yet they suffer. And what have you done for them? Nothing. Your systems are only applicable in Civilisation, whose misfortunes are aggravated each time your policies are put into practice. When you possess the art of making us happy, perhaps you will think you are fulfilling God's design by trying to limit happiness to the inhabitants of Civilisation, who occupy only a tiny part of the globe. But God sees the human race as a single family, all of whose members have a right to its blessings. He wants either the whole of mankind to be happy, or nobody at all.

If you want to promote the wishes of God you must seek for a social order that is applicable to the whole of the globe, not just to a few nations. The vastly greater number of savages and barbarians ought to warn you that they must be governed and controlled by attraction, not by force. Do you imagine you could win them over by the prospect of your customs, which can only be maintained by the use of gallows and bayonets? Customs which even your own people hate, and which all countries would rise up against if they were not held back by fear of the whip!

Argument

There is light on the horizon: we are moving on to dissertations which will contain nothing scientific and which will be comprehensible to everybody.

In the first part I gave the curious a glimpse of the great phenomena to come. Here, for pleasure-lovers, is a glimpse of the various pleasures which the combined order can permit them to enjoy in this present generation, as soon as it is organised. I emphasise how close at hand this good fortune is because nobody likes delays where pleasure is concerned, especially in a time when so much unhappiness has made everyone so eager for it.

By giving some advance sketches of the happiness that is impending, my already expressed intention is to awaken the reader's interest in the theory of association and attraction which promises so many delights, and to make him want the theory to be practicable. As people come to desire the truth and accuracy of the calculus, they will gradually get used to examining and studying this attraction on which such large hopes are founded.

Accordingly, I intend to reveal my theory just a little at a time, disseminating it imperceptibly in each treatise, only bringing it all together as a body of doctrine later. In brief, I mean to make the amounts of theory proportionate to the amount of curiosity I am able to arouse. I believe these precautions are necessary in order to ensure a welcome for a treatise which would be ignored, like all metaphysics, if I suddenly produced it all at once, without preparing the way.

Argument

Foreseeing the criticism of dryness that may be levelled at this first part, I have already warned that it is designed for scholarly readers, not for the frivolous. Those who have heard stories about the pleasures of the combined order may have expected to find them depicted here, to see the progressive Series in action and read nothing but seductive details about their domestic lives, the appetising composition of their feasts, the variety of their loves, festivals, entertainments, adventures, travels, etc., and about the voluptuous refinements the new order will introduce into the most insipid tasks.

Some people who have trembled with impatience at the description of these pleasures, unknown within Civilisation, might have liked to insist on having a complete picture, but a balanced approach requires that before I get down to the fine detail I first explain the General Destinies of the planet.

Consequently I shall deal with a period of 80,000 years, encompassing the entire vegetal life of the globe. I shall speak about the various creations which will follow on from that whose fruits we now see, the next one of which will begin in four centuries. I shall explain the physical changes this globe will undergo during the eighty thousand years of vegetation, seventy thousand of which will see the North Pole under full cultivation because of the shining ring of light, or northern crown, which will appear after two centuries of combined order.

At the outset of this work, as well as at its conclusion, I want to call attention to a truth quite new to civilised man: namely that the Theory of the Four Movements – social, animal organic and material – is the only subject of study that reason should sanction. It is the study of the General System of Nature, a problem God gives all Globes to resolve; and their inhabitants can only achieve happiness after they have resolved it.

Hitherto you have neither solved this problem nor even studied it; you have reached no further than the fourth, and lowest, branch of the theory, the one that deals with material movement, whose laws have been unveiled by Newton and Leibniz. I shall have occasion more than once to criticise this slow development of human intelligence.

In advance of the publication of my theory (as advertised) the present volume provides a slight glimpse of it, to which I have added some extended remarks on the political ignorance of Civilised Man, the two main examples of this ignorance being drawn:

and from the stupidity of the philosophers, who have done nothing to seek any better arrangement for the union of the sexes and the exchange of industrial products.

Introduction

Here we are dealing with the most tangible aspect of Civilisation, where it is hard not to raise one's voice against the madness of the present time and against the chimeras which are so fashionable.

To speak out today against the absurdities of commerce is to run the risk of being anathematised, as if one had spoken out in the twelfth century against the tyranny of the popes and the barons. In fact if I had to choose between two dangerous roles, I think there would be less risk of offending a sovereign with troublesome facts than of offending the mercantile character which reigns despotically over Civilisation and even over its sovereigns.

Nobody ever makes sound social judgements when they are in the depths of an infatuation, as witness the commercial systems: the slightest analysis will show that they deprave Civilisation and disorganise it in every way, and that in matters of commerce, as in everything else, they are going further and further astray under the auspices of the inexact sciences.

The controversy over commerce has scarcely been going on for half a century and its authors have already produced thousands of volumes without realising that the mechanism of commerce is organised against all common sense. All the essential classes – proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, even the government – are controlled by a secondary class, by merchants who ought to be their inferiors, their commission agents, removable and responsible, and yet who direct and obstruct at will all the resources of circulation.

God is the enemy of uniformity: he intends movement to be in perpetual change, whether in ascendance or descent. To this end God periodically brings to fruition in our societies seeds of beneficial or harmful innovations; it is up to reason to decide how to use these seeds and to stifle the bad ones, such as political clubs, or develop the good, like freemasonry.

What positive elements can we take from freemasonry? This is an entirely novel question for a century that was incapable of perceiving the opportunities this institution offered. Yet in rejecting it we are scorning a diamond, not recognising its worth, just as the savages of Guanahani trod lumps of gold underfoot before European cupidity taught them its value.

Often, when we think we are merely enjoying ourselves, we are involved in political processes of the highest importance: this was the case with the clubs or casinos I have already mentioned, which are an embryonic form of progressive household. This small innovation could have overturned the civilised order if it had grown, and if the clubs could have been brought to the point where they became resident households for bachelors of different ages and with differing amounts of wealth. The members of such households would soon have realised that the passions tend to subdivide all societies into a number of unequal, rival groups, and after various attempts they would gradually have succeeded in forming a nine-group tribe, in which the rivalries would be balanced and harmonised.

To familiarise yourselves with the luxury I shall be describing, you should re-read Note A, on the organisation of the progressive Series, in order to understand how an order so contrary to our customs will give diametrically opposite results, and produce as much magnificence as our incoherent labours produce misery and anxiety.

Order of topics dealt with in the second Account

You may complain that this is confusing, because the division is a post-hoc one, as I observed of the first account.

You must not lose sight of the fact that, in order to put the wonders I shall describe into operation, the combined order will have the help of four new passions which we have little or no sense of in the civilised order, where everything is opposed to their development.

These passions, which I have named

10th. The intermeshing,

11th. The varying,

12th. The graduating,

13th. Harmonyism,

can only work freely in the progressive Series; and as we are not used to such delightful passions they will seem as new as love seems to young people when they experience it for the first time.

This view may not seem very comforting to those who have already spent their best years in the gloom of Civilisation, but they should take heart: these new pleasures will be for people of all ages, and their anticipation should not be a cause for despair except during the interval that must elapse until the foundation of the combined order.

The Theory of the Four Movements appeared in the war–torn France of 1808. By any standards, it was an outlandish, disorganised and disconcerting mixture of ingredients. A well–observed critique of marriage, of the iniquities of free competition leading to ‘industrial feudalism’, of the tedium of work in civilisation and of the errors of the French Revolution was set side by side with assertions about the copulation between planets, oracular pronouncements about the life-span of the earth, extravagant promises about a new religion of ‘voluptuousness’ and a cryptic prospectus of the amorous and gastronomic delights which would accompany it. No author's name appeared on the title page and the place of publication, Lyons, was misleadingly stated to be Leipzig. Finally, whatever the other merits of the book, the exposition of The Theory of the Four Movements itself was bewilderingly brief: barely four pages, much of it in a footnote, scarcely more than the space-filling digression on the sad decline of provincial theatre.

Some of these obscurities can be attributed to worries about censorship during the First Empire. So can some of the circumlocutions. For instance, the war between France and England was prudently renamed ‘the battle against insular monopoly’. The author had already discovered that Bonapartist officials were particularly allergic to military pessimism. But, generally, the bizarre form of the book faithfully reflected authorial intention.

In these two treatises, I shall talk about the following topics:

I shall not separate these questions, as it would be hard for me to treat them in isolation. There is a lot of repetition in this book, and perhaps there ought to be more, to sustain attention to a subject so new and so opposed to all the philosophical prejudices the world is imbued with.

I shall divide this prospectus into three parts: Exposition, Descriptions and Confirmation.

1. The Exposition will cover some of the branches of the General Destinies: a subject as elevated and extensive as this will not interest the majority of readers, but it will be interspersed with enough curious detail to compensate for some dry passages. This first part is therefore addressed to the curious, to those studious men who are not afraid of encountering and overcoming a few obstacles in order to penetrate profound mysteries; they will be agreeably surprised to find expositions in this first part of such various subjects as the origin of societies, their future succession, and the material and social revolutions of our globe and of other worlds.

(The next five preliminary chapters must be read at least twice, and preferably three times, if you want fully to understand the chapters that follow, which will not prove difficult once the first five have been mastered.)

Definition and division

The destinies are the past, present and future results of God's mathematical laws of universal movement.

Universal movement is divided into four main branches: social, animal, organic and material.

1. Social Movement: this theory explains the laws by which God governs the ordering and succession of the different social mechanisms in all the inhabited globes.

2. Animal movement: this theory explains the laws by which God distributes the passions and instincts of all created beings, past and future, in the various globes.

3. Organic movement: this theory explains the laws by which God distributes properties, such as form, colour, smell, etc., to all created or future substances in the various globes.

4. Material movement: this theory, which has already been explained by modern geometricians, has taught us the laws by which God governs the gravitation of matter on the various globes.

There is no effect of movement which is not included in one or other of these four divisions; together they make up universal movement of which we only know about the fourth branch, material movement. Even this has as yet only been partially explained, as the geometricians, in pointing out the laws of the existing order of the stars, fail to take account of the changes the vortices of stars under went a hundred thousand years ago, and the changes they may undergo in a hundred thousand years' time.

I warned you that I would scatter a few chapters on the theory of social movement through the course of this book: here is one which is entertaining, but which also should be read twice, in order fully to understand the movement of Civilisation, the progress and decay of which are represented in the table on the next page.

By pointing out the opportunity for social progress provided by insular monopoly and freemasonry, I have demonstrated the incompetence of modern politics, which have been incapable of profiting by these means of improvement, these ways out of Civilisation.

The moderns are blinder still on the subject of the commercial mechanism; an analysis of it will prove the philosophers' insistence on stifling truth in all its forms and ignoring the most obvious symptoms of our ignorance of the art of society.

The rule of the commercial spirit is represented here as a degeneration or decadence of the civilised order, and the table of the civilised mechanism, which follows, indicates the positions held by commerce and monopoly. I shall explain (in the ‘Progressive table of civilised movement’) how progress and decadence are operated solely by natural forces, without the inexact sciences ever having provided any assistance. Each phase has special attributes which I shall not go into here.

Reading this work, you must try to avoid the mistake all the French make: they want a prospectus to contain all the details which properly belong in a treatise, and complain that they cannot understand how the changes I announce will be put into practice. If I had wanted to explain this I would have published a treatise, not a prospectus. It is not appropriate to begin by publishing my Theory; and as I have only published the announcement of it, I do not need to provide anything except a few glimpses to excite curiosity and create a demand for the treatise in which the practical means will be communicated.

My purpose in publishing this book was twofold: to test public opinion and to prevent plagiarism. It was a way of staking my claim, a measure particularly necessary in France where twenty plagiarists lay claim to every discovery and accuse the author himself of plagiarism.

I cast this essay in a form that was sometimes shocking, and varied its tone, in order to disguise the different tests I was making of readers' preconceived ideas, which are stronger in France than anywhere else.