M. Blanc, therefore, has given us the spectacle of a
vivid imagination ready to confront an impossibility; he has
believed in the divination of genius; but he must have perceived
that science does not improvise itself, and that, be one's name
Adolphe Boyer, Louis Blanc, or J. J. Rousseau, provided there is
nothing in experience, there is nothing in the mind.
M. Blanc begins with this declaration:
We cannot understand those who have imagined I know not what
mysterious coupling of two opposite principles. To graft
association upon competition is a poor idea: it is to substitute
hermaphrodites for eunuchs.
These three lines M. Blanc will always have reason to regret.
They prove that, when he published the fourth edition of his
book, he was as little advanced in logic as in political economy,
and that he reasoned about both as a blind man would reason about
colors. Hermaphrodism, in politics, consists precisely in
exclusion, because exclusion always restores, in some form or
other and in the same degree, the idea excluded; and M.
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