await the signal, full of ardor, and burning to commence the
work: but the architect has disappeared without leaving the plan.

The economists have stored their memories with many things:
unhappily they have not the shadow of an estimate. They know the
origin and history of each piece; what it cost to make it; what
wood makes the best joists, and what clay the best bricks; what
has been expended in tools and carts; how much the carpenters
earned, and how much the stone-cutters: they do not know the
destination and the place of anything. The economists cannot
deny that they have before them the fragments, scattered
pell-mell, of a chef-d'oeuvre, disjecti membra poetae; but it
has been impossible for them as yet to recover the general
design, and, whenever they have attempted any comparisons, they
have met only with incoherence. Driven to despair at last by
their fruitless combinations, they have erected as a dogma the
architectural incongruity of the science, or, as they say, the
INCONVENIENCES of its principles; in a word, they have denied the
science.[7]


[7] "The principle which governs the life of nations is not pure
science: it is the total of the complex data which depend on the
state of enlightenment, on needs and interests." Thus expressed
itself, in December, 1844, one of the clearest minds that France
contained, M. Leon Faucher. Explain, if you can, how a man of
this stamp was led by his economic convictions to declare that
the COMPLEX DATA of society are opposed to PURE SCIENCE.