and moral beliefs, the reformers were always endeavouring to
found such beliefs.

But on what could they be based? Evidently on reason. By means
of reason men create complicated machines: why not therefore a
religion and a morality, things which are apparently so simple?
Not one of them suspected the fact that no religious or moral
belief ever had rational logic as its basis. Auguste Comte saw
no more clearly. We know that he founded a so-called positivist
religion, which still has a few followers. Scientists were to
form a clergy directed by a new Pope, who was to replace the
Catholic Pope.

All these conceptions--political, religious, or moral--had, I
repeat, no other results for a long time than to turn the
multitude away from democratic principles.

If these principles did finally become widespread, it was not on
account of the theorists, but because new conditions of life had
arisen. Thanks to the discoveries of science, industry developed
and led to the erection of immense factories. Economic
necessities increasingly dominated the wills of Governments and
the people and finally created a favourable soil for the
extension of Socialism, and above all of Syndicalism, the modern
forms of democratic ideas.


2. The Unequal Influence of the Three Fundamental Principles of
the Revolution.