These silly speculations would not deserve even this slight indication of their purport were it not that Fourier founded a sect and had a considerable body of devoted followers.  His “discovery” was acclaimed by Beranger: 

   Fourier nous dit:  Sors de la fange,
    Peuple en proie aux deceptions,
    Travaille, groupe par phalange,
    Dans un cercle d’attractions;
    La terre, apres tant de desastres,
    Forme avec le ciel un hymen,
    Et la loi qui regit les astres,
    Donne la paix au genre humain.

Ten years after his death (1837) an English writer tells us that “the social theory of Fourier is at the present moment engrossing the attention and exciting the apprehensions of thinking men, not only in France but in almost every country in Europe.” [Footnote:  R. Blakey, History of the Philosophy of Mind, vol. iv. p. 293 (1848).  Fourier, born 1772, died in 1837.  His principal disciple was Victor Considerant.] Grotesque as was the theoretical background of his doctrines, he helped to familiarise the world with the idea of indefinite Progress.

2.

“The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the human race.  It was the age of iron they should have banished there.  The golden age is not behind us, but in front of us.  It is the perfection of social order.  Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them.”

The Comte de Saint-Simon, who wrote these words in 1814, was one of the liberal nobles who had imbibed the ideas of the Voltairian age and sympathised with the spirit of the Revolution.  In his literary career from 1803 to his death in 1825 he passed through several phases of thought, [Footnote:  They are traced in G. Weill’s valuable monograph, Saint-Simon et son oeuvre, 1894.] but his chief masters were always Condorcet and the physiologists, from whom he derived his two guiding ideas that ethics and politics depend ultimately on physics and that history is progress.

Condorcet had interpreted history by the progressive movement of knowledge.  That, Saint-Simon said, is the true principle, but Condorcet applied it narrowly, and committed two errors.  He did not understand the social import of religion, and he represented the Middle Ages as a useless interruption of the forward movement.  Here Saint-Simon learned from the religious reaction.  He saw that religion has a natural and legitimate social role and cannot be eliminated as a mere perversity.  He expounded the doctrine that all social phenomena cohere.  A religious system, he said, always corresponds to the stage of science which the society wherein it appears has reached; in fact, religion is merely science clothed in a form suitable to the emotional needs which it satisfies.  And as a religious system is based on the contemporary phase of scientific development, so the political system of an epoch corresponds to the religious system.  They all hang together.  Medieval Europe does not represent a temporary triumph of obscurantism, useless and deplorable, but a valuable and necessary stage in human progress.  It was a period in which an important principle of social organisation was realised, the right relation of the spiritual and temporal powers.