In his “Social Movements in France”[64] Lorenz von Stein uses these words, in comparing Saint-Simon and Fourier: “While Saint-Simon was sacrificing his life in Paris in his efforts to attain an unknown and only vaguely conjectured goal, and while his school was struggling against foes from within and without, there lived in another part of France a man who, without knowing Saint-Simon, was taking an essentially different route towards the same goal. This man was Charles Fourier.... Never has any land at the same time produced two men of such importance in the history of society.”[65] These two men together constitute one whole. Each was required as a complement of the other. The one started in his career as a man of wealth and social eminence, the other as a man of the people. The one observed society, studied its history, its development, and sought to find therein a clew to guide him in his work of regenerating the world, morally and economically; the other, regarding the past as such a series of blunders as to afford no proper basis for future formations, searched the depths of his own consciousness, and discovered a law which furnished premises, enabling him to construct deductively an ideal and perfect society, and to explain with mathematical accuracy the past, present, and future of the entire universe. Saint-Simon was a man of impulse and feeling; Fourier was a man of the understanding and logic. The former founded a religion; the latter a science. Charles Fourier was born in 1772 in Besançon. He came of an ordinary family and represented the middle-class. His father was a cloth-merchant in his native city, and he himself spent the greater part of his life in mercantile pursuits of one kind or another. Fourier seems to have been a bright boy, for when only eleven years of age he took prizes for excellence in French and Latin. He liked the study of geography, spending a considerable part of his pocket-money for maps and globes, and was passionately fond of music and flowers. It is said that he was himself a good musician. His mechanical ability was remarkable enough to attract attention at an early period in his life. As a commercial traveller he visited Germany and Holland, and was thus able to gratify his desire to see the world. Upon the death of his father, he inherited about one hundred thousand francs at an early age, invested the money in foreign trade, and lost it in the siege of Lyons in 1793, during the Reign of Terror, when his bales of cotton were used to form barricades and his provisions to feed the soldiers. But Fourier’s misfortunes did not end here. He was taken prisoner, and kept in confinement for some time, expecting daily to be led forth to execution. Release, however, enabled him to join the army, for which he had some taste. It is, indeed, stated that he was able to make suggestions concerning military operations which were followed to advantage by his superiors. But ill-health obliged