It is evident that these views transformed the theory of Condorcet into a more acceptable shape.  So long as the medieval tract of time appeared to be an awkward episode, contributing nothing to the forward movement but rather thwarting and retarding it, Progress was exposed to the criticism that it was an arbitrary synthesis, only partly borne out by historical facts and supplying no guarantees for the future.  And so long as rationalists of the Encyclopaedic school regarded religion as a tiresome product of ignorance and deceit, the social philosophy which lay behind the theory of Progress was condemned as unscientific; because, in defiance of the close cohesion of social phenomena, it refused to admit that religion, as one of the chief of those phenomena, must itself participate and co-operate in Progress.

Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording data for foreseeing the future.  Saint-Simon raised this suggestion to a dogma.  But prevision was impossible on Condorcet’s unscientific method.  In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be discovered, and Condorcet had not found or even sought a law.  The eighteenth century thinkers had left Progress a mere hypothesis based on a very insufficient induction; their successors sought to lift it to the rank of a scientific hypothesis, by discovering a social law as valid as the physical law of gravitation.  This was the object both of Saint-Simon and of Comte.

The “law” which Saint-Simon educed from history was that epochs of organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution, succeed each other alternately.  The medieval period was a time of organisation, and was followed by a critical, revolutionary period, which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch of organisation.  Having discovered the clew to the process, Saint-Simon is able to predict.  As our knowledge of the universe has reached or is reaching a stage which is no longer conjectural but positive in all departments, society will be transformed accordingly; a new physicist religion will supersede Christianity and Deism; men of science will play the role of organisers which the clergy played in the Middle Ages.

As the goal of the development is social happiness, and as the working classes form the majority, the first step towards the goal will be the amelioration of the lot of the working classes.  This will be the principal problem of government in reorganising society, and Saint-Simon’s solution of the problem was socialism.  He rejected the watchwords of liberalism—­democracy, liberty, and equality—­with as much disdain as De Maistre and the reactionaries.