What is Property?

responded best to the character of my mind, seemed to me the most in harmony with the research I wished to undertake. A memoir, composed at that time on one of the most interesting questions of comparative grammar (1), served, if not to reveal a striking success, at least to attest to the solidity of my work.

Since that moment, metaphysics and ethics have been my sole occupation: the experience I have gained that these sciences, still poorly defined in their object and poorly circumscribed, are, like the natural sciences, susceptible to demonstration and certainty, has already rewarded my efforts.

But, gentlemen, of all the masters I have followed, it is to you that I owe the most. Your competitions, your programs, your indications, in agreement with my secret wishes and my dearest hopes, have not ceased to enlighten me and to show me the way; this memoir on property is the child of your thoughts.

In 1838, the Academy of Besançon proposed the following question: To what causes must the ever-increasing number of suicides be attributed, and what are the means appropriate to stop the effects of this moral contagion?

It was, in less general terms, to ask what is the cause of the social evil, and what is the remedy for it. You yourselves recognized it, gentlemen, when your commission declared that the competitors had perfectly enumerated the immediate and particular causes of suicide, as well as the means to prevent each of them; but that from this enumeration, made with more or less talent, no positive lesson had resulted, neither on the primary cause of the evil, nor on the remedy.

In 1839, your program, always piquant and varied in its academic expression, became more precise. The competition of 1838 had signaled as causes, or to better say as diagnostic signs of social malaise, the forgetting of religious and moral principles, the ambition of

(1) Research on Grammatical Categories, by P.-J. Proudhon; a memoir honorably mentioned by the Academy of Inscriptions, May 4, 1839. Unpublished.