1808 Introduction

Summary

At the outset of this work, as well as at its conclusion, I want to call attention to a truth quite new to civilised man: namely that the Theory of the Four Movements – social, animal organic and material – is the only subject of study that reason should sanction. It is the study of the General System of Nature, a problem God gives all Globes to resolve; and their inhabitants can only achieve happiness after they have resolved it.

Hitherto you have neither solved this problem nor even studied it; you have reached no further than the fourth, and lowest, branch of the theory, the one that deals with material movement, whose laws have been unveiled by Newton and Leibniz. I shall have occasion more than once to criticise this slow development of human intelligence.

In advance of the publication of my theory (as advertised) the present volume provides a slight glimpse of it, to which I have added some extended remarks on the political ignorance of Civilised Man, the two main examples of this ignorance being drawn:

In the 2nd part, from the vices of the conjugal system;

In the 3rd part, from the vices of the commercial system;

and from the stupidity of the philosophers, who have done nothing to seek any better arrangement for the union of the sexes and the exchange of industrial products.