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were well founded when they were urged 

 against what Engels called " Utopian 

 socialism." 



When socialism before Karl Marx was 

 only the sentimental expression of a humani- 

 tarianism, as generous as it was careless of 

 the most elementary principles of scientific 

 positivism, it was quite natural to find its 

 partizans yielding to the impetuosity of their 

 heart, either in their vehement protestations 

 against social iniquities or their dreamy con- 

 templation of a better world to which their 

 imagination sought to give exact outlines 

 from Plato's "Republic" to Bellamy's "Look- 

 ing Backward." 



It can readily be understood how easily 

 these structures laid themselves open to 

 criticism. This criticism was partly wrong, 

 moreover, because it started from the mental 

 habits proper to a modern environment, and 

 which will change with the change of environ- 

 ment ; but it was partly well founded, because 

 the enormous complexity of social phenomena 

 renders impossible every prophecy on the 

 small details of a social organisation which 

 will differ from ours more profoundly than our 

 present society differs from that of the Middle 

 Ages, because the bourgeois world, like the 

 society which preceded it, has maintained 

 individualism for a basis, whilst the socialist 

 world will have its guiding idea fundamen- 

 tally different. 



These prophetic constructions of a new 

 social order are for the rest the natural product 

 of the political and social artificialism with 



