Among the creators of ideal societies there is one, almost contemporary, who would deserve a study of individual psychology--Ch. Fourier. If it is a question merely of fertility in pure construction, I doubt whether we could find one superior to him--he is equal to the highest, with the special characteristic of being at the same time exuberant to delirium and exact in details to the least minutiae. He is such a fine type of the imaginative intellect that he deserves that we stop a moment. His cosmogony seems the work of an omnipotent demiurge fashioning the universe at will. His conception of the future world with its "counter-cast" creations, where the present ugliness and troubles of animal reign become changed into their opposites, where there will be "anti-lions," "anti-crocodiles," "anti-whales," etc., is one example of hundreds showing his inexhaustible richness in fantastic visions: the work of an imagination that is hot and overflowing, with no rational preoccupation. On the other hand, his psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries. Assuming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he assigns it first a period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period of completion, 9,000 years; and then a period of "descending subversion," whose first stage is 27,000 years, and the second 4,000 years--a total of 81,000 years. This form of imagination is already known to us.[142] The principal part of his psychology, the theory of the emotions, questionable in many respects, is relatively rational. But in the construction of human society, the duality of his imagination--powerful and minute--reappears. We know his methodical organization: the _group_, composed of seven to nine persons; the _series_, comprising twenty-four to thirty-two groups; a _phalanx_ that includes eighteen groups, constituting the phalanstery; the small city, a general center of phalanges; the provincial city, the imperial capital, the universal metropolis. He has a passion for classification and ordering; "his phalanstery works like a clock."