this can happen only in a rationally constituted society which,
without losing any of its fundamental principles, attains con
stantly new insights into human relationships. It is not the pro
liferation o f written laws that constitutes progress; it is the
increase o f laws conceived and observed by men in their hearts.
Hence the Church, with its emphasis on transcendence, is the
enemy o f progress since, by posing the Absolute as the revealer
and guarantor of Justice, it has brought about the degeneration
o f human dignity and spontaneity, has negated equality and has
delayed the social regeneration o f man by fifteen centuries. The
justice which the Church teaches is not real; it is a form o f idolatry.
‘God is the shadow of the conscience projected on the field o f the
imagination. While we take that shadow for a sun it is inevitable
that we should remain in the twilight.’ It is when man sees, not
the shadow, but the substance of his conscience, that he begins to
be free, and the more he recognises the true Justice within him,
the happier he will live and the less he will fear to die. The
primitive cycle of ascendance and decadence gives way to progress
when man recognises that the gods have departed, that the role
of the cults is ended, and that Justice is the rule by which human
affairs should be regulated and inspired.
The theory of progress, Proudhon claims, applies to the arts
as well as to other phases o f social life. ‘Art, as well as liberty,
has for its material men and things; its object is to reproduce
them in transcending them, and its final end is Justice.’ Those
artists who have best interpreted the world o f their time and
mirrored its aspirations towards Justice are always the most
satisfying; it was because they turned away from their own time,
because they rejected the Revolution and its implications, that
Proudhon found his own contemporaries decadent.
*The tenth and eleventh parts o f Justice are devoted to ‘Love
and Marriage,’ and involve an extensive consideration o f the
status o f women; it was these sections, with their attacks on the
feminist position, that aroused the greatest misgivings among
the liberals and even in such close friends of Proudhon as Michelet
and Herzen, who elaborately refuted them in My Past and
Thoughts.
Proudhon regards marriage as a product not merely o f man’s
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE