Surely it is more philosophical and more manly to acknowledge at once great natural facts which not only exist, but apart from which we can form no just or adequate conception of human nature. Man, then, is subject to suffering, and consequently society is also subject to it. Suffering discharges a function in the individual, and consequently in society. An accurate investigation of the social laws discloses to us that the mission of suffering is gradually to destroy its own causes, to circumscribe suffering itself within narrower limits, and finally to assure the preponderance of the Good and the Fair, by enabling us to purchase or merit that preponderance. [p077] The nomenclature we have proposed places material wants in the foreground. The times in which we live force me to put the reader on his guard against a species of sentimental affectation which is now much in vogue. There are people who hold very cheap what they disdainfully term ‹material wants›, ‹material satisfactions›: they will say, as Belise says to Chrysale, “Le corps, cette guenille, est-il d’une importance, D’un prix à mériter seulement qu’on y pense?” And although, in general, pretty well off themselves, they will blame me for having indicated as one of our most pressing wants, that of ‹food›, for example. I acknowledge undoubtedly that moral advancement is a higher thing than physical sustenance. But are we so stuffed with declamatory affectation that we can no longer venture to say, that before we can set about moral culture, we must have the means of living. Let us guard ourselves against these puerilities, which obstruct science. In wishing to pass for philanthropical we cease to be truthful; for it is contrary both to reason and to fact to represent moral development, self-respect, the cultivation of refined sentiments, as preceding the requirements of simple preservation. This sort of prudery is quite modern. Rousseau, that enthusiastic panegyrist of the ‹State of Nature›, steered clear of it; and a man endued with exquisite delicacy, of a tenderness of heart full of unction, a spiritualist even to quietism, and, towards himself, a stoic—I mean Fénélon—has said that, “After all, solidity of mind consists in the desire to be exactly instructed as to how those things are managed which lie at the foundation of human life—all great affairs turn upon that.” Without pretending, then, to classify our wants in a rigorously exact order, we may say, that man cannot direct his efforts to the satisfaction of moral wants of the highest and most elevated kind until after he has provided for those which concern his preservation and sustenance. Whence, without going farther, we may conclude that every legislative measure which tells against the material well-being of communities injures the moral life of nations,—a ‹harmony› which I commend, in passing, to the attention of the reader. And since the occasion presents itself, I will here mark another.