These facts might be employed to support a conclusion of an entirely different character. That equality of inheritance which was preserved rather than created by the French Revolution might be taken as a proof that modern societies are tending to multiply the number of individual proprietors by dividing the land between an increasing number of its citizens. But such discussion does not belong to a work of this kind. We are entitled to say, however, that the Saint-Simonian theory is a kind of prologue to all those doctrines that ransack the pages of history for arguments in favour of the transformation, or even the suppression, of private property. Here again the Saint-Simonians have merely elaborated a view which their master had only casually outlined. Saint-Simon, also believed that in history we have an instrument of scientific precision equal to the best that has yet been devised. Saint-Simon, who owes something in this matter to Condorcet, regarded mankind as a living being having its periods of infancy and youth, of middle and old age, just like the individuals who compose it. Epochs of intellectual ferment in the history of the race are exactly paralleled by the dawning of intellectual interests in the individual, and the one may be foretold as well as the other. “The future,” says Saint-Simon, “is just the last term of a series the first term of which lies somewhere in the past. When we have carefully studied the first terms of the series it ought not to be difficult to tell what follows. Careful observation of the past should supply the clue to the future.”[490] It was while in pursuit of this object that Saint-Simon stumbled across the term “industrialism” as one that seemed to him to express the end towards which the secular march of mankind appeared to lead. From family to city, from city to nation, from nation to international federation—such is the sequence which helps us to visualise the final term of the series, which will be some kind of “a universal association in which all men, whatever other relations they may possess, will be united.”[491] In a similar fashion the Saint-Simonians interpret the history of individual property and predict its total abolition through a process of its gradual extension to all individuals combined with the extinction of private inheritance.