Etymonia (1875)

«There is no security, but in order; no power, but in union; no agreement, but in uniformity; no perpetuity, but in truth; no system, but in law». The anonymous author’s response to the 19th century debate on evolutionism is an attempt to systematize human passions and characters within the boundaries of a simplified sociology. The dirigist measures commanding man’s drives are rooted in a conception of human psychology as a set of structured behaviours: thus sexual intercourse is determined by the mere satisfaction of natural appetites. The solution to overpopulation is “peaceably to extinguish the excessive increase of infant life, either whiles in embryo or immediately after birth»; the 25 volumes of knowledge avoid the «ever-accumulating heap of reiterations». The containment of birth rates as well as the inhibition of a dialectical cultural debate show the writer’s repression of threatening agents of mutability: his utopian island is a geometrical scheme where people do not exist as individuals but function as mechanical wheels. Aged senators with flowing white beards guard an unfeasible ideal society where theoretical principles such as «the order is the order of the orderly, not of the subdued» or «the men are manly, the women womanly» are but sterile, categorical tautologies. Rather than an organic community the author sketches a mechanist microcosm run by factors of order, it is a plain world whose lack of depth, both real and metaphorical, will be carried to its extreme within a decade in Abbott’s Flatland (1888).