Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 06
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 06
Literature -- Collections
If I drew my doctrine of Union in part from the eclecticism of Cousin,
I drew my views of the Church and of the reorganization of the
race from the Saint-Simonians,--a philo-sophico-religious or a
politico-philosophical sect that sprung up in France under the
Restoration, and figured largely for a year or two under the monarchy of
July. Their founder was Claude Henri, Count de Saint-Simon, a descendant
of the Due de Saint-Simon, well known as the author of the 'Memoirs.' He
was born in 1760, entered the army at the age of seventeen, and the
year after came to this country, where he served with distinction in our
Revolutionary War under Bouillié. After the peace of 1783 he devoted two
years to the study of our people and institutions, and then returned to
France. Hardly had he returned before he found himself in the midst of
the French Revolution, which he regarded as the practical application of
the principles or theories adopted by the reformers of the sixteenth
century and popularized by the philosophers of the eighteenth. He looked
upon that revolution, we are told, as having only a destructive
mission--necessary, important, but inadequate to the wants of humanity;
and instead of being carried away by it as were most of the young men of
his age and his principles, he set himself at work to amass materials
for the erection of a new social edifice on the ruins of the old, which
should stand and improve in solidity, strength, grandeur, and
beauty forever.
The way he seems to have taken to amass these materials was to engage
with a partner in some grand speculations for the accumulation of
wealth,--and speculations too, it is said, not of the most honorable or
even the most honest character. His plans succeeded for a time, and he
became very rich, as did many others in those troublous times; but he
finally met with reverses, and lost all but the wrecks of his fortune.
He then for a number of years plunged into all manner of vice, and
indulged to excess in every species of dissipation; not, we are told,
from love of vice, any inordinate desire, or any impure affection, but
for the holy purpose of preparing himself by his experience for the
great work of redeeming man and securing for him a Paradise on earth.
Having gained all that experience could give him in the department of
vice, he then proceeded to consult the learned professors of L'École
Polytechnique for seven or ten years, to make himself master of science,
literature, and the fine arts in all their departments, and to place
himself at the level of the last attainments of the race. Thus qualified
to be the founder of a new social organization, he wrote several books,
in which he deposited the germs of his ideas, or rather the germs of the
future; most of which have hitherto remained unpublished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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