The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX are, a mouse, while you are a rat. Make yourself a cat, and you will capture it. In one of the admirable stories which, though he did not invent it, he has told better than anybody, Perrault puts upon the stage a cat, which cunningly induces an ogre to change himself into a mouse, and the thing is no sooner done, than the mouse is crunched by the cat. The Zales of Mother Goose, like the Golden Ass of Apuleius, are perhaps true magical legends, and hide beneath the cloak of childish fairy tales the formidable secrets of science. It is a matter of common knowledge that magnetizers give to pure water the properties and taste of wine, liqueurs and every conceivable drug, merely by the laying-on of hands, that is to say, by their will expressed in a sign. One knows, too, that those who tame fierce animals con- quer lions by making themselves mentally and magnetically stronger and fiercer than lions. Jules Gérard, the intrepid hunter of the African lion, would be devoured if he were afraid. But, in order not to be afraid of a lion, one must make one’s self stronger and more savage than the animal itself by an effort of imagination and of will. One must say to one’s self: It is 1 who am the lion, and in my presence this animal is only a dog who ought to tremble before me. Fourier imagined anti-lions; Jules Gérard has realized that chimera of the phalansterian? dreamer. But, one will say, in order not to fear lions, it is enough to be a man of courage and well armed. 1 Fourier was a Socialist who wrote a sort of “Utopia.” His social unit was the “ phalanstére.”—TRANS. 272