We have eaten, says one, of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the taste of them has been thenceforth invariably blended together. There is a law of compensation--thus another expresses it--throughout the world, both moral and physical, by which every evil is balanced by its good, and every good by its besetting evil. Humanity, says a third, progresses without doubt, and obtains at each stage a fuller and a higher life; but there is an original proportion of misery in its lot, from which there is no escape: this also swells and darkens as we rise. To use the language of chemistry, you may increase the volume of this ambient life we breathe, but still, to every one-hundred part of vital air there shall be added twenty-five of mephitic vapour. All these are different modes of expressing the homely truth, that a shadow of evil falls even from the best of things; and it is this truth which is really developed in the _Contradictions Economiques_. It is a truth which, at times, it may be very needful fully to recognise. When men of sincere convictions are found agitating society for some organic change, their errors may be always traced to an over-sanguine and one-sided view of the capabilities of man for happiness. The conservative and the movement parties, philosophically considered, may be described as branching out of different opinions on the probable or possible progress of society. The philosophical conservative has accepted humanity as it is--as, in its great features, it is exhibited throughout all regions of the earth, and in the page of history: he hails with welcome every addition to human happiness; he believes in progress, he derides the notion of perfectibility,--it is a word he cannot use; he recognises much happiness coming in to mankind from many and various sources, but still believes that man will never find himself so content on earth as to cease looking forward for the complement and perfection of his felicity to another world. The philosopher of the movement party has made a sort of religion of his hopes of humanity: he conceives some ideal state, and anticipates its development _here_; he dismantles heaven and immortality to furnish out his masquerade on earth; or, with still vaguer notions, he rushes forward upon reforms that imply, for their justification, the existence of what never yet was seen--a temperate and enlightened multitude.