condition.  By a direct and total subversion of political notions, the most fundamental, it represents government as being, by its nature, the necessary enemy of society, against which it sedulously places itself in a constant state of suspicion and watchfulness; it is disposed incessantly to restrain more and more its sphere of activity, in order to prevent its encroachments, and tends finally to leave it no other than the simple functions of general police, without any essential participation in the supreme direction of the action of the collective body or of its social development.

“Approaching to a more detailed examination of this doctrine, it is evident that the absolute right of free examination (which, connected as it is with the liberty of the press and the freedom of education, is manifestly its principal and fundamental dogma) is nothing else, in reality, but the consecration, under the vicious abstract form common to all metaphysic conceptions, of that transitional state of unlimited liberty in which the human mind has been spontaneously placed, in consequence of the irrevocable decay of the theologic philosophy, and which must naturally remain till the establishment in the social domain of the positive method.[49] ...  However salutary and indispensable in its historical position, this principle opposes a grave obstacle to the reorganization of society, by being erected into an absolute and permanent dogma.  To examine always without deciding ever, would be deemed great folly in any individual.  How can the dogmatic consecration of a like disposition amongst all individuals, constitute the definitive perfection of the social order, in regard, too, to ideas whose finity it is so peculiarly important, and so difficult, to establish?  Is it not evident, on the contrary, that such a disposition is, from its nature, radically anarchical, inasmuch as, if it could be indefinitely prolonged, it must hinder every true mental organization?

“No association whatever, though destined for a special and temporary purpose, and though limited to a small number of individuals, can subsist without a certain degree of reciprocal confidence, both intellectual and moral, between its members, each one of whom finds a continual necessity for a crowd of notions, to the formation of which he must remain a stranger, and which he cannot admit but on the faith of others.  By what monstrous exception can this elementary condition of all society be banished from that total association of mankind, where the point of view which the individual takes, is most widely separated from that point of view which the collective interest requires, and where each member is the least capable, whether by nature or position, to form a just appreciation of these general rules, indispensable to the good direction of his personal activity.  Whatever intellectual development we may suppose possible, in the mass of men it is evident, that social order will