Censors inquire into men's capacities, assign tasks to the unemployed, and if man be found fit for nothing but the consumption of food he is banished from the city.
These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which Mercier's imagination reached.

He did not put it forward as a final term.

Later ages, he said, will go further, for "where can the perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical arts and chemistry ?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science might effect he showed curiously little resource.

The truth is that this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific discoveries might transmute social conditions.

The world of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow for the strength of human passions and interests, and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty.