And because it has been thought sufficient to catch up a phrase dragged from all its context, so it has happened that Proudhon to-day, although he is one of the most frequently mentioned authors, is hardly either known or read. Although the question of property forms the corner-stone of all Proudhon's teaching, yet it would be wrong to identify it with his doctrine entirely. And it is no less wrong to represent the first attempt which Proudhon made to solve so great a problem as the whole of his views about property, as unfortunately even serious authors have hitherto done almost without exception, and especially those who make a special study of him, such as Diehl. As a matter of fact, Proudhon has carefully and elaborately set forth his theory of property in several other works which are mixed up for the most part with his other numerous writings, and has left behind a fragment of a book on the theory of property, in which he meant to produce a comprehensive theory of property as the foundation of his whole work. We must, therefore, in order not to anticipate, leave a complete exposition of Proudhon's theory of property to a later portion of this book, hence we will merely glance at the work, _What is Property?_ and also at another study which appeared in 1843 called _The Creation of Order in Humanity_, which shows the second, or I might say, the political side of Proudhon's train of thought in its first beginnings, and of which Proudhon himself said later, that it satisfied neither him nor the public, and was worse than mediocre, although he had very little to retract in its contents. "This book, a veritable infernal machine, which contains all the implements of creation and destruction," he said in his _Confessions_, "is badly done, and is far below that which I could have produced if I had taken time to choose and arrange properly my materials. But however full of faults my work may now appear, it was then sufficient for my purpose. Its object was to make me understand myself. Just as contradiction had been useful to me to destroy, so now the processes of development served me to build up. My intellectual education was completed, the _Creation of Order_ had scarcely seen the light, when, with the application of the creative method which followed immediately upon it, I understood that in order to obtain an insight into the revolution of society the first thing must be to construct the whole series of its antitheses, or the system of opposites."