John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[530] smell, hearing. Then there are four social passions-namely, friendship, ambition, love, and the family affection. Then there are three intellectual affections which distribute the harmonies of the others. These are: First, the love of change-nobody wants to pursue any occupation longer than an hour and a half or two hours. The mind becomes tired and you need alternation. The next is analysis. That impulse takes a subject to pieces and finds out its parts. Then the third is the composite or combining passion, the desire that takes the parts of anything which you have analyzed, and combines them in a new whole, as Beethoven or Handel combined and varied the notes of the octave in a symphony or oratorio, in which the whole is new, while the elements are all old and familiar. Then, finally, in this system of metaphysics, the soul of man as a whole has an impulse towards unity, a passion for universal harmony, a religious passion. If, now, you arrange society in accordance with this analysis of the soul, if you combine all these elements, as a great composer combines the notes of the musical scale, you will have harmony, economy, joy, and delight, and life will be one scene of continuous pleasure and continuous usefulness, greater, nobler, more elevated, more complete than man in this world has yet known. Industry, instead of being monotonous, tedious, and repugnant, will be attractive, a source of pleasure and of artistic delight. That is the theory of Fourier stated in a most general manner. But it requires at least eight hundred men and women, eight hundred people, to apply this theory at all, and eighteen hundred to apply it thoroughly. With fewer than that it is impossible to arrange this social symphony; also it requires a vast capital. Fourier labored all his life on the problem. He had few friends, apparently. He was all his life publishing books of impressive eloquence, brilliant analysis, and indignant protest, and appealing to kings and millionaires to come forward and give him the two million dollars which he found necessary to realize his theory and demonstrate to mankind that the millennium could now be begun and developed on the earth. But he never found the backer he was looking for, and died without even beginning to illustrate his idea.