It is, if I may venture to use the comparison,
the womb, sterile by itself, but to which come to deposit
themselves the germs created by private activity, which, in
hermaphroditic society, really performs the function of the male
organ.
But society preserves itself only so far as it avoids solidarity
with private speculations and leaves every innovation absolutely
to the risk and peril of individuals. It would take but a few
pages to contain the list of useful inventions. The enterprises
that have been carried to a successful issue may be numbered; no
figure would express the multitude of false ideas and imprudent
ventures which every day are hatched in human brains. There is
not an inventor, not a workman, who, for one sane and correct
conception, has not given birth to thousands of chimeras; not an
intelligence which, for one spark of reason, does not emit
whirlwinds of smoke. If it were possible to divide all the
products of the human reason into two parts, putting on one side
those that are useful, and on the other those on which strength,
thought, capital, and time have been spent in error, we should be
startled by the discovery that the excess of the latter over the
former is perhaps a billion per cent.
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