positive minds, and which, spreading the absurdest delusions,
makes so many fresh dupes every day. My complaint of socialism
is not that it has appeared among us without cause, but that it
has clung so long and so obstinately to its silliness.

2. But the economists have erred no less gravely in rejecting a
priori, and just because of the contradictory, or rather
antinomical, nature of value, every idea and hope of reform,
never desiring to understand that, for the very reason that
society has arrived at its highest point of antagonism,
reconciliation and harmony are at hand. This, nevertheless, is
what a close study of political economy would have shown to its
adepts, had they paid more attention to the lights of modern
metaphysics. It is indeed demonstrated, by the most positive
evidence known to the human mind, that wherever an antinomy
appears there is a promise of a resolution of its terms, and
consequently an announcement of a coming change. Now, the idea
of value, as developed by J. B. Say among others, satisfies
exactly these conditions. But the economists, who have remained
for the most part by an inconceivable fatality ignorant of the
movement of philosophy, have guarded against the supposition that
the essentially contradictory, or, as they say, variable,
character of value might be at the same time the authentic sign
of its constitutionality,--that is, of its eminently harmonious
and determinable nature. However dishonorable it may be to the
economists of the various schools, it is certain that their
opposition to socialism results solely from this false
conception of their own principles; one proof, taken from a
thousand, will suffice.