It seems incredible that this commercial traveller, who on one side of his brain was so completely unreasonable, should have produced a scheme which has in many respects now come to be regarded as fundamentally right. Fourierism, divested of its absurd extravagance, contains the germ of much modern socialism. For Fourier was one of the first to realise “that social organisation should rest on a comprehensive conception of human nature.” The first task of a reformer, he held, is to analyse human passions and to study their combinations. But Fourier’s psychology, as one might expect, is extremely fanciful. He discovered twelve major passions which can be combined into eight hundred and ten characteristic types. No one of these types can be fully himself, nor reap the greatest benefit from his labour in a state of isolation or in the state of permanent warfare, which we call competition. In our present inorganic condition, legitimate desires clash and may often be called vices. In the free and communistic _régime_ of the future they will all be harmonised. Production will be increased a thousandfold by the association of efforts. Labour will be no longer a curse, for it will become attractive through the free choice and constant change of occupation. The part of Fourier’s scheme which most appealed to his contemporaries was his ideal community, in which he hoped to embody his ideas in concrete form. This community he called the Phalanstery. Juliette well remembered how, when she was a child, a fervent Fourierist had visited her father at Blérancourt. He had talked in such glowing terms of this ideal community that she forthwith resolved that on her return to Chauny she and her schoolfellows would lose no time in establishing a phalanstery. She was, however, reluctantly compelled to admit the justice of her father’s remark that at the age of nine and a half she was rather young to launch out on so complicated an experiment. For, indeed, simplicity was no part of the root idea of the phalanstery. This may be seen from the following enunciation of his principle by the master himself. “Since there are only eight hundred and ten characters,” argued Fourier, “a phalanx of that number (or rather one thousand eight hundred with old men over one hundred and twenty and children under four) will be sufficient to realise Harmony on about a square league of ground. This phalanx would live in a handsome and comfortable building—farm, workshop and palace combined—called the Phalanstery. In this association capital and talent as well as labour would have their proper reward.” Few of the various attempts to establish phalansteries met with any success. Fourier himself, aided by one of his most eminent disciples, Victor Considérant, and financed by a French Député, endeavoured in vain to apply his theories at Condé sur Vesgres.[77] After Fourier’s death in 1837, another vain attempt at a phalanstery was made at Citeaux.