General Introduction To Social Science - Introduction To Fourier's Theory Of Social Organization, Social Destinies (1876) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: key to all discoveries accessible to the human mind; it is to initiate us immediately into sciences which, according to our present slow methods, might have cost thousands of years more of study. Its announcement will excite distrust, in the beginning, from the mere fact that it promises to elevate man to a knowledge of his Destiny. I think it proper, therefore, to make known the indications which put me on the track. This explanation will prove that the discovery required no scientific effort, and that the humblest man of science might have attained to it before myself, if he had possessed the requisite qualification?freedom from prejudice. It was in this respect that I had an aptitude for the calculation of Destinies, which the philosophers, who always support and extol dominant prejudices even while pretending to combat them, have always lacked. Under the name of philosophers, I include here only those engaged in the uncertain sciences ? the politicians, moralists, political economists and others ? whose theories are incompatible with experience, and have for their only rule the caprice of their authors. It will be borne in mind, then, that whenever in the course of the present work I speak of the philosophers, I allude to those of the uncertain school, and not at all to those engaged in the positive sciences. INDICATIONS AND METHODS WHICH LED TO THE ANNOUNCED DISCOVERY. Nothing was further from my thoughts than researches on the subject of Destinies. I partook of the general opinion which regards them as impenetrable, and which ranks all calculations upon them with the visions of astrologers and magicians. The study which led me to their investigation related only to certain industrial and political problems of which I will here give some idea. After the incompet...