IV.

I was saying a moment ago that our doctrine makes history objective and

in a certain sense naturalizes it, going from the explanation of the

data, evident at first sight, of the personalities acting with design,

and of the auxiliary conceptions of the action, to the causes and the

motives of the will and the action, in order to find thereupon the

co-ordination of these causes and of these motives in the pre-elementary

_processus_ of the production of the immediate means of existence.

Now this term "naturalizing" has led more than one mind into confusing

this order of problems with another order of problems, that is to say,

into extending to history the laws and the manners of thinking which

have already appeared suitable to the study and explanation of the

material world in general and of the animal world in particular. And

because Darwinism succeeded in carrying, thanks to the principle of the

transformation of species, the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity

of things, and in discerning, in the organisms, phases, as it were, and

moments of a real and proper natural history, it has been imagined that

it was a commonplace and simple enterprise to borrow for an explanation

of the future and the history of human life the concepts, the principles

and the methods of examination to which that animal life is subjected

which in consequence of the immediate conditions of the struggle for

existence is unfolding to topographical environments not modified by the

action of labor. Darwinism, political and social, has, like an epidemic,

for many years invaded the mind of more than one thinker, and many more

of the advocates and declaimers of sociology, and it has been reflected

as a fashionable habit and a phraseological current even in the daily

language of the politicians.

It seems at first sight that there is something immediately evident and

instinctively plausible in this fashion of reasoning, which it may be

said is principally distinguished by its abuse of analogy and by its

haste in drawing conclusions. Man is without doubt an animal, and he is

linked by connections of descent and affinity to other animals. He has

no privileges of origin or of elementary structure, and his organism is

merely one particular case of general physiology. His first immediate

field was that of simple nature not modified by work, and from thence

are derived the imperious and inevitable conditions of the struggle for

existence, with the consequent forms of adaptation. Thence are born

races in the true and authentic sense of the word; that is to say, in so

far as they are immediate determinations of black, white, yellow,

woolly-haired, straight-haired, etc., and not secondary historico-social

formations, that is to say, peoples and nations. Thence are born the

primitive instincts of sociability and in life in promiscuity arise the

first rudiments of sexual selection.

But if we can reconstruct in imagination the primitive savage, by

combining our conjectures, it is not given us to have an empirical

intuition of him, just as it is not given us to determine the genesis of

that hiatus, that is to say, that break in continuity, thanks to which

human life is found detached from animal life to rise, in the sequel, to

an ever higher level. All men who live at this moment on the earth's

surface and all those who, having lived in the past, were the objects

of any trustworthy observation, are found, and were found, already

sufficiently removed from the moment when purely animal life had ceased.

A certain social life with customs and institutions, even if it be of

the most elementary form that we know, that is to say, of the Australian

tribes, divided into classes and practising the marriage of all the men

of one class with all the women of another class, separates human life

by a great interval from animal life. If we consider the _maternal

gens_, of which the classic type, the Iroquois type, has, thanks to

Morgan's work, revolutionized prehistoric science, while giving us at

the same time the key to the origins of history properly so called, we

have a form of society already much advanced by the complexity of its

relations. At that stage of social life which, according to our

knowledge, seems very elementary, that is to say, in the Australian

society, not only does a very complicated language differentiate men

from all other animals (and language is a condition and an instrument, a

cause and an effect of sociability), but the specialization of human

life, apart from the discovery of fire, is manifested by the use of many

other artificial means by which the needs of life are satisfied. A

certain territory acquired for the common use of a tribe, a certain art

of hunting--the use of certain instruments of defense and attack and the

possession of certain utensils for preserving the things acquired--and

then the ornamentation of the body, etc., all this means that at bottom

this life rests upon an artificial, although very elementary, basis,

upon which men endeavor to fix themselves and adapt themselves,--upon a

basis which is after all the condition of all further progress.

According as this artificial basis is more or less formed, the men who

have produced it and who live in it are considered more or less savage

or barbarous. This first formation constitutes what we may call

pre-history.

History, according to the literary use of the word, namely, that part of

the human _processus_ whose traditions are fixed in the memory, begins

at a moment when the artificial basis has been formed for a considerable

length of time. For example, the canalization of Mesopotamia gives us

the ancient pre-Semitic Babylonian state, while the extremely ancient

Egyptian civilization rests upon the application of the Nile to

agriculture. Upon this artificial basis, which appears in the extreme

horizon of known history, lived, as now, not shapeless masses of

individuals, but organized groups whose organization was fixed by a

certain distribution of tasks, that is to say, of labor and by

consecutive methods of co-ordination and subordination. These relations,

these connections, these ways of living were not and are not the result

of the crystallization of customs under the immediate action of the

animal struggle for existence. What is more, they presuppose the

discovery of certain instruments, and, for example, the domestication of

certain animals, the working of minerals and even of iron, the

introduction of slavery, etc., instruments and methods of economy which

have first differentiated communities from each other and have

subsequently differentiated the component parts of these communities

themselves. In other words, the works of men in so far as they live

together react upon the men themselves. Their discoveries, and their

inventions, by creating artificial ways of living, have produced not

only habits and customs (clothing, cooking of food, etc.), but relations

and bonds of coexistence proportioned and adapted to the mode of

production and reproduction of the means of immediate life.

At the dawn of traditional history economics is already operating. Men

are working to live, on a foundation which has been in great part

modified by their work and with tools which are completely their work.

And from that moment they have struggled among themselves to conquer

each from the other a superior position in the use of these artificial

means; that is to say, they have struggled among themselves whether as

serfs and masters, subjects and lords, conquered and conquerors,

exploited and exploiters, both where they have progressed and where they

have retrograded and where they have halted in a form which they have

not been capable of outgrowing, but never have they returned to the

animal life by the complete loss of their artificial foundation.

Historical science has, then, as its first and principal object the

determination and the investigation of this artificial foundation, its

origin, its composition, its changes and its transformations. To say

that all this is only a part and a prolongation of nature, is to say a

thing which by its too abstract and too generic character has no longer

any meaning.

The human race, in fact, lives only in earthly conditions, and we cannot

suppose it to be transplanted elsewhere. Under these conditions it has

found from its very first beginnings down to the present day the

immediate means necessary for the development of labor, that is to say,

for its material progress as for its inner formation. These natural

conditions were and they are always indispensable to the sporadic

agriculture of the nomads, who sometimes cultivated the earth merely for

the pasturage of animals, as well as for the refined products of

intensive modern horticulture. These earthly conditions, precisely as

they have furnished the different sorts of stones suited for the

fabrication of the first weapons, furnish now also, with coal, the

elements of the great industry; precisely as they gave the first

laborers osiers and willows to plait, they give now all the materials

necessary to the complicated technique of electricity.

It is not, however, the natural materials themselves which have

progressed. On the contrary, it is only men who progress, through

discovering little by little in nature the conditions which permit them

to produce in more and more complex forms, thanks to the labor

accumulated in experience. This progress does not consist merely in the

sort of progress with which subjective psychology is concerned that is

to say, the inner modifications which would be the proper and direct

development of the intellect, the reasoning and the thought. Moreover,

this inner progress is but a secondary and derived product, in

proportion as there is already a progress realized in the artificial

foundation which is the sum of the social relations resulting from the

forms and the distributions of labor. It is, then, a meaningless

affirmation to say that all this is but a simple prolongation of nature,

unless one wishes to employ this word in so generic a sense that it no

longer indicates anything precise and distinct; that which is not

realized by the work of man.

History is the work of man in so far as man can create and improve his

instruments of labor, and with these instruments can create an

artificial environment whose complicated effects react later upon

himself, and which by its present state and its successive modifications

is the occasion and the condition of his development. There are, then,

no reasons for carrying back that work of man which is history to the

simple struggle for existence. If this struggle modifies and improves

the organs of animals, and if in given circumstances and methods it

produces and develops new organs, it still does not produce that

continuous, perfected and traditional movement which is the human

_processus_. Our doctrine must not be confounded with Darwinism, and it

need not invoke anew the conception of a mythical, mystical or

metaphorical form of fatalism. If it is true in effect that history

rests, before all else, upon the development of technique, that is to

say, if it is true that the successive discovery of tools gives rise to

the successive distributions of labor, and therewith to the inequalities

whose sum total, more or less stable, forms the social organism, it is

equally true that the discovery of these instruments is at once the

cause and the effect of these conditions and of those forms of the inner

life to which, isolating them by psychological abstraction, we give the

name of imagination, intellect, reason, thought, etc. By producing

successively the different social environment, that is to say, the

successive artificial foundations, man has produced himself, and in this

consists the serious kernel, the concrete reason, the positive

foundation of that which by various fantastic combinations and by a

varied logical architecture has suggested to the ideologists the notion

of the progress of the human mind.

Nevertheless, this expression of _naturalizing_ history, which,

understood in too broad and too generic a sense, may be the occasion of

the equivocations of which we have spoken, when it is, on the contrary,

employed with proper precaution and in a tentative fashion, sums up

briefly the criticism of all the ideological views which, in the

interpretation of history, start from this hypothesis, that human work

or activity are one and the same with free will, free choice and

voluntary designs.

It was easy and convenient for the theologians to carry back the course

of human events to a preconceived plan or design, because they passed

directly from the facts of experience to an assumed mind which ruled the

universe. The jurists, who first had occasion to discover in the

institutions which formed the object of their studies a certain guiding

thread through the forms which manifestly succeeded each other, carried

over, as they still carry over as cheerfully, the reasoning faculty

which is their own quality, to serve as an explanation for the whole

vast social fabric, however complicated. The men of politics, who

naturally take their point of departure in this datum of experience,

that the officers of the state, whether by the acquiescence of the

subject masses or profiting by the antitheses of interests of the

different social groups, may set aims for themselves and realize them

voluntarily and in a deliberate fashion,--these men are brought to see

in the succession of human events only a variation of these designs,

these projects and these intentions. Now our conception, while

revolutionizing in their foundations the hypotheses of the theologians,

the jurists and the politicians, terminates in this affirmation, that

human labor and activity in general are not always one and the same

thing in the course of history with the will which acts with design,

with preconceived plans and with its free choice of means; that is to

say, that they are not one and the same thing with the reasoning

faculty. All that has happened in history is the work of man, but it

was not, and is not, with rare exceptions, the result of a critical

choice or of a reasoning desire. Moreover, it was and is through

necessity that, determined by external needs and occasions, this

activity engenders an experience and a development of internal and

external organs. Among these organs we must include intelligence and

reason which also are the result and consequence of repeated and

accumulated experience. The integral formation of man in his historical

development is henceforth no longer a hypothetical datum nor a simple

conjecture. It is an intuitive and palpable truth. The conditions of the

_processus_ which engenders a step of progress are henceforth reducible

into a series of explanations; and up to a certain point we have under

our eyes the schedule of all historical developments, morphologically

conceived. This doctrine is the clear and definite negation of all

ideology, because it is the explicit negation of every form of

rationalism, understanding by this word this concept, that things in

their existence and their development answer to a norm, an ideal, a

measure, an end, in an implicit or explicit fashion. The whole course of

human events is a sum, a succession of series of conditions which men

have made and laid down for themselves through the experience

accumulated in their changing social life, but it represents neither the

tendency to realize a predetermined end nor the deviation of a first

principle from perfection and felicity. Progress itself implies merely

that empirical and circumstantial notion of a thing which is at present

defined in our mind, because, thanks to the development thus far

realized, we are in a position to estimate the past and to foresee, at

least in a certain sense and in a certain measure, the future.