BOOKS.

FOURIER'S PASSIONS OF TSB HUMAN' sour..• THE first impulse by which a tolerably sane mind is moved after reading a few pages of the work, so delusively entitled The Pas- sions of the Human Soul, is to " laugh consumedly," to stamp vehemently, or to throw- the book into the waste-paper basket, according as the merry, irritable, or decisive mood dominates. Its pretensions are so magnificent, its jargon so intolerable, its contri- butions to knowledge so meagre, that the only parallel in wonder to its original composition is the fact that it should have found a translator, and that capital should have been embarked in printing and publishing the translation. Truly, as M. Fourier himself re- minds us, quoting Boileau, "Un sot trouve tonjours un plus sot qui radmire." Not that M. Fourier or his translator is necessarily "un sot,"—" nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit,"—but the book is a foolish, transcendentally foolish, book ; and it is matter of astonishment how any man not influenced by the partiality naturally felt towards the offspring of his own mind could spend upon such a book labour and money. Still, whatever the book be, Fourierism is a great fact; and the knowledge that thousands upon thousands of intelligent Frenchmen believe in the man and in his theories, more or less implicitly, supplies a motive for no- ticing a work which can never obtain an extended circulation in this country. Between 1814 and 1822, Fourier composed a book on the theory and plans of Association, large enough to fill nine considerable oc- tavo volumes; of which two alone were published at the time, under the titles of L'Association Domestique Agricole, and La 17th'orie de l' Unite Universelle. The present work, on the Passions of the Soul, is a translation of one of the remaining seven volumes, with some few extracts from the others. It may be considered as the analytical vestibule to the theory of the Phalanx ; the discussion of the motive-springs of human action which justify that form of association, as the one most suited to man's nature, and most con- ducive to the happiness and the progress of the race and of the indi- vidual. For the Phalansterians, accordingly, the book may possess that peculiar attraction which belongs to any professedly scientific explanation of a practical system in which men's hopes and inte- rests are warmly engaged. By the rest of the world it will be judged not by its correspondence with the arrangements of the Phalanx, but by the harmony of its methods with those by which truth has hitherto been attained, and by the consistence of its re- sults with facts hitherto observed.

So far, then, as M. Fourier has any distinct method for ascer- taining what are the passions of the human soul,—by which he means, all motives which determine the will, it consists in a very rough and superficial observation, supplemented by a spurious ana- logy, through which a known or supposed fact concerning one ob- ject is held to demonstrate an identical fact respecting the matter in hand, however dissimilar in kind the two objects may be. Thus all philosophers till M. Fourier have failed in the analysis of the passions, because they have been ignorant " of the fact that the passions are distributed like a tree, which, beginning from the trunk or fools, gives subdivisions progressive in number." " The analysis of the passions ought therefore to ramify as follows : stem—classes—orders—genera," &e. So that, because a tree ra- mifies from a single stem, the passions must likewise ramify from one pivotal passion, which gives successive birth to all the rest. But the tree will not serve for the next step, and we are taken into celestial regions, where we find that the material world moves ac- cording to a law of contrasted or dual development, giving us the planets in " harmonis " and the comets in " subversive develop- ment," with gradations of rank between the heavenly bodies. "We ought to admit the same division in every classification of the pas- sions." All this apparatus is to prove a priori that a man may use his passions so as to promote his wellbeing, or the contrary. We have then a pivotal passion and derivatives of ascending powers, each capable of a twofold and opposite development. The next pro- blem is to determine the number and kinds of each successive ramification. This our author shall accomplish in his own words. " The material world, being in all its details hieroglyphic of the passional, God must have created emblems of the passions in all the degrees. For ex- ample, we have a beautiful material emblem for the second degree divided by twelve, and this is music confined to twelve tones ; and there is a very beau- tiful material emblem of the third degree divided into thirty-two, which is the planetary vortex formed of thirty-two notes, and the human jaw with thirty-two teeth. You do not reckon the pivotal piece, which is the sun in the case of the stars, and the os hyoides in the case of the teeth ; in the same way that in music you do not count the thirteenth tone, which becomes unisonant or pivotal to the first. "It will therefore be necessary, in the classification of the passions in a compound system, to distinguish-

" As harmonic pivot, one base of harmony—Unityism.

"As subversive pivot, one base of subversion—Egoism. "In the first power—

Three harmonic bases, Three subversive bases. Luxism, Loveism, Counter-luxism. Counter-loveism.

Sufism, Counter-seriism. Pivot k trnityism, 1)4 Egoism. "In the second power- 12 harmonic bases, 12 subversive bases. 6 Sensitives, 4 Affectives, The same in counter- development, or dia- 3 Distributives, cordant essence. P1 Pivot Unityism. 61 Egoism."

• The Passions of the Human Soul. By Charles Fourier. Translated from the French, by the Reverend John Beynell Morel. With Critical Annotations, a Bio- graphy of Fourier, and a General Introduction. By Hugh Doherty. Volumes I. and II. Published by Hyppolyte

And so he proceeds, till, in the fifth power, he obtains 405 pas- sions ; solely, so far as we can discern, because in the human body there are 405 muscles, and these must be emblems of the fifth de- gree of passional development. At least this is the only reason given for the particular number ; and M. Fourier does not embar- rass himself by tabulating any power beyond the second. The scale of the second power is exhibited as analogous to a musical scale.

Scale of the Passions. Scale of Musical Notes.

1. Sight. # let, half tone, flat or sharp.

Sensuous pas- 2. Hearing. # 2d, 2, f) sons or attrac- 3. Taste. # 3d, II It tiOn6. 4. Smell. # 4th, „ ” 5. Touch. 9 5th, It I)

6. Friendship. Do, or tonic note.

Affections. 7' I've' mi, or mediant note.

8. Familism. Sol, or dominant note.

9. Ambition. Sr, or sensitive note.

I

Distributive (10. Emulation. Ex, or sub-mediant note.

passions, or the 11. Alternation. Fe, or sub-dominant note.

love of order. 12. Cumulation. LA, or tonic of the minor key. H. UNITY181d. Do, unison or octave note.

And we apprehend that this number 12 was fixed on simply because the musical scale is divided into that number of semitones. Whatever may have led Fourier to the scale, it forms the basis of his passional system, to which everything that follows is referred. It becomes therefore important to analyze it, as its errors multiply themselves in a rapidly increasing ratio in the higher powers of the passional derivatives.

First, then, come five faculties by which we become conscious of certain phnomena of external things, and to supply which with such phtenomena as cause us pleasures in the perception, is doubtless a motive acting on the will. Next are placed, not four faculties by which corresponding phaenomena of persons are impressed on our consciousness, but four modes of emotion, all dependent for their generic distinction on the sense of personality in ourselves and the recognition of it in others, with which three bodily senses at least— touch, hearing, and sight-are combined, and to the second of which a peculiar material Mallon, that of sex, commonly belongs. Third- ly, we have a group whose names express certain combinations or special forms, in which the nine previous passions operate. Emula- tion, for instance, is a special form of ambition ; Alternation and Cumulation are simply the desires for distribution of action among the faculties, and for their simultaneous or complete gratification. These three groups are supposed to be the first subdivision of the triune man, sensitive, emotional, and intellectual; corresponding to another trinity, whose terms are, if we mistake not, Matter, God, and Mathematics. Now it is plain that man intellectual is not contained in either of the groups; for the last, in which he ought to appear, merely tabulates three out of an infinite number of relations between the members of the other two. The mental faculties do not therefore enter into Fourier's analysis ; and mental wants and mental pleasures, the whole range of literature and science, are not in his theory motives that have any power in deter- mining the will. Then again, in his enumeration of the senses, he is ignorant of what has been called the greatest metaphysical dis- covery of this age, the separation of the sense of extension,—what Brown, the discoverer, called "the muscular sense." This is the more important as upon it is sometimes made to depend our knowledge of an external world at all; and if the senses by which the qualities of that world are known to us are springs of action, surely that by which we know the primary quality of externality is not to be left unnoticed; it ought to be considered, in Fourier's own lingo, the " pivotal " sense. And surely it is a very superficial glance at our relations to persons, which sees in them only various degrees of love, since ambition in this terminology is only "cabal- istic or sectarian affection for confederates." But the whole duo- denary basis seems to us as defective as it is arbitrary and hetero- geneous, and to be made up almost at random from a rough obser- vation, as we said, supplemented by that most fanciful analogy of the musical scale.

Fourier lays great stress upon the fact, that no one but himself has noticed that these passions, as he calls them, are capable of "potential degrees of development." So far as the development notion has any foundation in truth, the experience of every child might have contradicted the arrogant assumption. But he is quite right in stating that no one has carried the theory of potential de- velopment to the grandeur of absurdity which he has reached. The following passage will give a general indication of his where- abouts.

"It would be difficult to imagine a pair of eyes more confined in func- tions than those of man. They are afflicted with two radical vices—con- vergence and ' linearity.' "I have already remarked the very serious inconvenience of linearity or parallelism. Our eyes, compared with those of a bird or a fish, have not half a development. We hardly embrace a third of a circle, whereas the bird and fish embrace more than two-thirds, though limited, as we are, to a couple of

eyes.

" ' Do you mean to say,' the jesters will ask me, 'that God ought to have placed our two eyes above our ears, to put us on a par with carps and chickens ?' I maintain that God ought to place our eyes in such a position as to secure us a greater sweep of vision than any other beings. Man is king of nature. If each of his senses is so confined as to make him wish for the sensual faculties of the beasts—if, in short, the king covets at every step the lot of his subjects—is not our globe the world upside down f This is what happens in the existing state, as well in the sense of sight as in the four others. Each of the five senses only reaches the eighth part of the de- velopment of which it is susceptible."

With this theory of " a good time coming" for the five senses, H. Fourier couples corresponding changes in the condition and

productions of our earth, and of the planetary system generally. We are to go nearer to the sun, and a universal concentration is to take place through the whole system ; new animals are to be created, with properties corresponding to those possessed in " the subversive scale " by the mightiest beasts of the present " civilized " period,—anti-lions and anti-condors, which are to carry us along at the astounding pace of thirty miles an hour. Truly facts are sometimes stranger than fictions. Then, art is to advance to a splen- dour of which we poor " oivilisees" only discern the faintest glimpse. Among other pleasant speculations, the following, to be realized by the glasses of the " harmonic" period acting on a physical phEenomenon specially revealed to H. Fourier alone, strikes the fancy agreeably. "It may be stated that each planet is enclosed in a brilliant shell adjacent to the atmosphere. This aerial shell or adjacent reflector exists even with the dead planets ; for the moon has a reflector, pale and dull it is true. You can judge by the appearance of Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and Mars, how bril- liant this reflector is in a living star, where it is sustained and maintained by a contiguous atmosphere.

" This aerial mirror officiates within as well as without : without, it re- flects only light ; within, it reflects the scenes that are taking place on the surface of its planet. You may compare it to a soap-bubble, which paints colours and images.

"When our eyes, now reduced to the brute degree 0, shall be strength- ened and raised by degrees to the unitary accord kwe shall be able at cer- tain hours, in serene weather, by the aid of optical instruments, to see in the celestial reflector an immense magiclantern, in which all the remarkable movements that take place in a circuit of 150 leagues (from five to six de- grees) will be depicted. These pictures will not be perceived by simple sight; they will require to be discerned by the aid of reflector telescopes—in short, of some apparatus or other. The natural philosophers Would easily be able to determine it.

" Then the principal effect, such as the sailing of a fleet, will be very dis- tinctly perceived at the moment when the solar ray, by its obliquity, will cut the reflector into arcs. The reflection will not take place beyond the arcs, whereof the chord formed by the solar ray is not continuous, being in- tercepted by the earth. In like manner, the reflection will cease at the moment when the ray shall cease to cut a segment and shall graze the reflector at a tangent. Thus the scenes will be reflected in a narrow segment during the two twilights, afterwards in increasing and decreasing segments. At any given point—ear Paris—the solar ray will cut a very large are of the reflector at sunrise and sunset. This arc, by diminishing for three hours in the morning, and increasing during three hours in the evening, will enable the Parisians to observe the mirror during all this time. Its extent will comprise more than 250 leagues at the moment of sunrise and sunset. I have not made an exact calculation of it, but Ijudge of it by a comparison with the effect of terrestrial sphericity, which suffers us to perceive the masts of a ship on the high seas, at the distance of twenty-five leagues. Conse- quently, a fleet will often be seen from Paris to enter the ports of Bordeaux or Bristol at the time of sunrise or sunset. The movements at the ports of Brest and Amsterdam will be seen longer, and still longer those at London and Antwerp ; finally, those at Havre and Dieppe will be seen a very long while, as they can be reflected in small segments of the reflector, and several hours moreover after sunrise or sunset."

The cool audacity with which this and similar feats of the " har- monic" race are prophesied in detail, furnishes the best test of M. Fourier's mental condition. To use his own jargon, " when his knowledge was in the ascending limbo, he would pass himself off for a male reverent."

The " passions " are not only to be gigantically developed when the harmonic or phalansterian system is introduced, and in some mysterious way through the operation of this system, but they are to be freely indulged. The theory of " passional attraction "is that the impulses are of God's creation, therefore good, therefore to be followed. But to follow them, in the present state of society, is partly impossible for the mass, and for the few who can do so is the source of misery as often as of pleasure. Therefore society is reduced to an absurdum by this very fact, and must be reconsti- tuted in such associations as admit of the free indulgence of all the " passions " as its first condition. We have no intention of dwell- ing on the obvious results of this law, but simply to remark what a profound knowledge that man has of the human heart, who founds societies for permanence and for the highest human development on the principle of doing away with family ties, and allowing pro- miscuous concubinage between all the men and women of his phalanx. The most odious feature in this book is, not the bold- ness with which this conclusion is urged, (for a man has a right to express even. that intellectual conviction, if he be unfortunate enough to arrive at it,) but the thoroughly French prurience with which the topic is handled, the delight and amusement with which the fancy of the author struts upon the moral dunghill which he has raised.

But not only are all passions good,—which, considering them as instruments of the will, perhaps a moralist might allow,—but all characters are good, i. a. in the state of harmony ; for in the pre- sent civilized sera all are bad. As the twelve before-mentioned radical passions belong necessarily to the individual man and wo- man, and are the springs of individual life, so to the "passional man," consisting of 810 individual men and women, belong neces- sarily 810 characters, in which certain of the radical passions do- minate singly or in combination. Those with a single dominant amount to 576 out of 810, and form the passional populace of the phalanx; those with two or more dominants successively diminish m inverse proportion to their number of dominants, and form the official staff of the communities. Here, if anywhere, we should have expected to find Fourier's analysis triumphant, and observa- tion of men to come into play,—and this section of his book is the most suggestive : but even here the observer is very subordinate to the juggler with a set of formulae and figures, and there is little of the freshness of life about his delineations. One amusing spe- cimen is given from observation, and contrasts most agreeably with the greater portion of a book which, treating of the passions, gives

us scarce anything but unreal combinations of cabalistic figures and nonsensical phraseology.

" Let us add some monogyne of a subaltern and visible species : here is one that seemed surprising to me. It was a tippler, a monogyne with the dominant of taste, the tonic of drinking. I saw him in a public diligence or stage-coach ; he was not a sottish drunkard, but a man gifted with a mar- vellous instinct for referring all the circumstances of life to wine. Similar to those mystical personages who see everything in God, this fellow saw everything in wine ; instead of reckoning time by hours and half-hours, he reckoned it by the number of bottles drunk. Supposing you asked him, ' Will it take long to reach such a place?' ' Well ! about the time of drinking four bottles.' When the horses stopped for a moment, I said to him, Do we stop long here?' About long enough to toss off a bottle standing.' Now I knew that in his arithmetic a bottle drunk while stand- ing was equal to five minutes, and a bottle drunk while seated was

ten minutes. One of the two coaches on the road, which had bad horses, passed 1/8 going down a hill ; but he called out to it, in a bantering tone, 'Bah, bah, we shall drink before you! '—that is to say, we shall arrive before you ; for why do you arrive at all if not to drink ? One of the passengers made us wait at the station where he had got down ; the passen- gers complained, and asked, What is he after ? he delays us.' The mono- gyne replied, 'Perhaps he has not yet drunk his gill,'—for why do people delay you except to it be drink. A lady experienced sickness from the move- ment of the coach ; one person proposed elixir, another eau-de-cologne ; the monogyne cut short the whole by saying, ' You had better drink a little wine, ma'am ! '—for what is the remedy for every sickness, if it be not wine?— and he gallantly measured out the dose according to the delicacy of the sub- ject. Some one ventured to complain of the weather, which was cold and foggy; our friend took him up severely, and explained that the weather was exeedingly good, because it kept back the vines that would have been ex- posed to frost by too precocious a vegetation. I listened to him during the moments he conversed familiarly with one of his companions; and nothing was heard llut dozens of wine, casks being tapped, beginning to drink the wine, &c. In short, wine was to this man a focus, or a common centre, to which he referred all nature : a dish was only worth something because it was a help to drinking ; a horse was not worth so much money, but such a quan- tity of Macon wine in small casks ; whatever subject happened to be dis- cussed in his presence, he knew how to adapt it to wine with a finesse of tact and pertinateness that men of wit would not have had. He was not on that account a drunkard, but a well-defined monogyne, well characterized by the tonic of drinking."

This reads like a bit of Theophrastas or La Brnyere; either of whom, as well as numerous other humourists, essayists, and drama- tists, to say nothing of historians, might have given lessons to Fourier on the potential scale, and typical distribution of cha- racters.

Two years before his death, Fourier stated, in answer to a oharge of religions scepticism, that there were two doctrines which he could not deny, without denying his own—the doctrine of Christ in religion, and that of Newton in science. It is no part of the simply critical function to find fault with him for being neither Christian nor Newtonian, but the assertion is mentioned as an il- lustration of Fourier's power of blinding himself to enormous and essential differences, and catching hold of superfieiol resemblances. Jesus healed the sick, Paulpreached the redemption of the body, and Newton from a simple ease of gravitation is said to have been led on to unfold the mighty law of attraction by which bodies are connected through infinite space. So, because Fourier schemes for the material comforts of men, and promises an indefinite enlarge- ment of the physical faculties, he proclaims himself a Christian teacher ; and because he jumps at once from a rough observation of phmnomena that fall within the range of his senses to a detailed description of phrenomena present and to come utterly without any basis of experience or true analogy, he is a follower of Newton. His claims to be a leader of thought, a guide to science, may fairly be tested by this strange assertion of his. If, then, his pretensions are in this direction so ludicrously disproportionate to his per- formances, how is his influence to be explained, not over an unintel- ligent band of followers like those of Joe Smith the Mormonite, but over persons of property,intelligence, knowledge, and literary skill Undoubtedly, by the fact that great truths and grand conceptions lie at the root of his system, however they may be marred in the utterance, and distorted by the hazy medium through which they are transmitted. " Travail attrayant" is a great truth, a watch- word of hope for the suffering millions, and not less for the thou- sands whom our modern civilization kills with tedium and inertia. Industrial armies, universal peace, and organized cooperation, are grand conceptions, that give vividness and reality to the millennium of poetic and of priestly prophets. Even the con- ception of the work we have been reviewing is grandly. comprehen- sive; and, did it but lay no more than the'foundations of the design- ed structure in method and result, it would be the most valuable contribution of this age to human knowledge, to the knowledge of man and of society It would in that case have put us in the true way of learning all the motive forces from which individual life and the life of society flow forth phsenomenally, and their possible corn- , com- binations in individuals and in societies. It would thus compre- hend the statical branches of the sciences of psychology, ethology, I

and sociology ; and would be invaluable as conveying to the edu- cator and the legislator a knowledge of the elements on which and with which each have to work. Statical it is rather than dynamical, because, if properly limited, it would contemplate man and society at rest, not in movement from one stage of de- velopment to a higher; though its practical utility would only then be manifested when it was made subservient to the dyna- mical branch. How far M. Fourier is from realizing any such sober yet magnificent conception, the remarks we have made and the passages we have quoted will suffice to prove. On the con- trary, a wildly fanciful cosmogony, an outrageous abuse of ana- logy, a disagreeable because an obtrusive and self-relished harping on the animal appetites, usurp three-fourths of the space which would not have been at all too large for the results of a subtile

analysis of the passional springs, and a delineation of their com- binations as ascertainable by wide and profound observation of men and of society directed by a specific purpose, and aided by a scholar's familiarity with the traits and combinations of character preserved from the past by literature and history. Still, the idea of the work is given : he who accomplishes it must bear engraven on his heart Bacon's great law, "Homo naturm minister et interpres tantum facit et intelligit quantum de naturm ordine re vel mente observaverit.