This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other,
is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in
that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is
ordinarily called _verbalism_. This bad habit creeps into and spreads
itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to
the so-called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-social
_complexus_, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of
words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense
of things.
In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain
use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the
calculus have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and
methodical relation with things and their variations, as in the natural
sciences properly so-called,--there the myth and superstition of words
are left behind and vanquished; there the questions of terminology no
longer have more than the secondary value of pure convention. In the
study of human relations and actions, on the contrary, the passions, the
interests, the prejudices of school, sect, class and religion, the
literary abuse of the traditional means of representing thought, and
scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the actual
things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into
abstract and conventional fashions of speech.
We must, first of all, take account of this difficulty when we use the
expression or the formula "materialistic conception of history." Many
have imagined, do imagine, and will imagine that it is possible and
convenient to penetrate into the sense of the phrase by the simple
analysis of the words which compose it instead of arriving at it from
the context of an explanation, from the genetic study of the formation
of the doctrine,[28] or from the polemical writings in which its
partisans refute the objections of its opponents. Verbalism tends always
to shut itself up in purely formal definitions; it gives rise in the
minds to this erroneous belief, that it is an easy thing to reduce into
terms and into simple and palpable expressions the agitated and immense
_complexus_ of nature and history and that it is easy to picture the
multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects; in clearer
terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees in
them nothing but questions of nomenclature.
If, moreover, it then happens that verbalism finds a support in certain
theoretical hypotheses, for example, that _matter_ indicates something
which is below or opposed to another higher or nobler thing which is
called spirit; or if it happens to be at one with that literary habit
which opposes the word materialism, understood in a disparaging sense,
to all that, in a word, is called idealism, that is to say, to the sum
total of the anti-egoistic inclinations and acts; then our embarrassment
is extreme! Then we are told that in this doctrine it is attempted to
explain the whole of man by the mere calculation of his material
interests and that no value whatever is allowed to any ideal interest.
The inexperience, the incapacity and the haste of certain partisans and
propagandists of this doctrine have also been a cause of these
confusions. In their eagerness to explain to others what they themselves
only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only in its
beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed
they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were
considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it
thus to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for
scientific novelties, and other idle persons of the same type.
Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut
these prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions
and the tendencies underlying them, it must be remembered that the
meaning of this doctrine ought, before all else, to be drawn from the
position which it takes and occupies with regard to the doctrines
against which it is in reality opposed, and particularly with regard to
the ideologies of every sort;--that the proof of its value consists
exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate explanation of the
succession of human events which is derived from it;--that this doctrine
does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality or a
certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other
interests, but that it merely affirms the objective co-ordination and
subordination of all interests in the development of all society; and
this it affirms, thanks to that genetic _processus_ which consists in
going from the conditions to the conditioned, from the elements of
formation to the things formed.
Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word
_matter_ in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception,
or in so far as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum
of experience. We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or
biology; we are only searching for the explicit conditions of human
association in so far as it is no longer simply animal. It is not for us
to support our inductions or our deductions upon the data of biology,
but, on the contrary, to recognize before all else the peculiarities of
human association, which form and develop through the succession and the
growing perfection of the activity of man himself in given and variable
conditions, and to find the relations of co-ordination and
subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action.
It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a
criticism; it is merely the necessity arising from the facts that must
be put in evidence.
And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act
otherwise, satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn,
give rise to others in their upward development, and as for the
satisfaction of their needs, whatever they may be, they invent and
employ certain means and certain tools and associate themselves in
certain definite fashions, the materialism of historical interpretation
is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method
the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through
the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ from that of all
the other doctrines which after many excursions through the domains of
the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching the
prose of reality and halting there.