X.

Ethics, art, religion, science, are they then but products of economic

conditions?--expositions of the categories of these very

conditions?--effluvia, ornaments, emanations and mirages of material

interests?

Affirmations of this sort, announced with this nudity and crudity, have

already for some time passed from mouth to mouth, and they are a

convenient assistance to the adversaries of materialism, who use them as

a bugbear. The slothful, whose number is great even among the

intellectuals, willingly fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of

such declarations. What a delight for all careless persons to possess,

once for all, summed up in a few propositions, the whole of knowledge,

and to be able with one single key to penetrate all the secrets of life!

All the problems of ethics, aesthetics, philology, critical history and

philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from all

difficulties!

In this way the simpletons might reduce the whole of history to

commercial arithmetic; and finally a new and authentic interpretation of

Dante might give us the Divine Comedy illustrated with the process of

manufacturing pieces of cloth which the wily Florentine merchants sold

for their greater profit!

The truth is that the declarations which involve problems are converted

very easily into vulgar paradoxes in the heads of those who are not

accustomed to triumph over the difficulties of thought by the methodical

use of appropriate means. I shall speak here, in general terms, of these

problems, but, as it were, by aphorisms; and certainly I do not propose

to write an encyclopedia in this short essay.

And first of all, ethics.

I do not mean systems and catechisms, religious or philosophic. Both of

these have been and are above the ordinary and profane course of human

events in most cases, as Utopias are above things. Neither do I speak of

those formal analyses of ethical relations, which have been elaborated

from the Sophists down to Herbart. This is science and not life. And it

is formal science, like logic, geometry and grammar. The one who latest

and with so much profundity defined these ethical relations (Herbart),

knew well that ideas, that is to say, the formal points of view of the

moral judgment, are in themselves powerless. Therefore he put into the

circumstances of life and into the pedagogic formation of character the

reality of ethics. He might have been taken for Owen if he had not been

a retrograde.

I am speaking of that ethics which exists prosaically and in an

empirical and current fashion, in the inclinations, the habits, the

customs, the counsels, the judgments and the appreciations of ordinary

mortals. I am speaking of that ethics which as suggestion, as impulse

and as bridle, appears in different degrees of development, and more or

less unmistakably, although in a fragmentary fashion, among all men; by

the very fact of association because each occupies a definite position

in the association, they naturally and necessarily reflect upon their

own works and the works of others, and they conceive obligations and

appreciations and all the first elements of general precepts.

There is the _factum_; and what is most important is that this _factum_

appears to us varied and multiple in the different conditions of life,

and variable through history. This _factum_ is the _datum_ of research.

Facts are neither true nor false, as Aristotle already knew. Systems, on

the contrary, theologic or rational, may be true or false because they

aim to comprehend, explain and complete the fact, by bringing that fact

to another fact, or integrating it with another.

Some points of preliminary theory are henceforth settled, in all that

concerns the interpretation of this _factum_.

The will does not choose of itself, as was supposed by the inventors of

_free will_, that product of the impotency of the psychological analysis

not yet arrived at maturity. Volitions, in so far as they are facts of

consciousness, are particular expressions of the psychic mechanism.

They are a result, first of necessities, and then, of all that precedes

them up to the very elementary organic impulse.

Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no

such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable,

as that spiritual entity which has been called the _moral conscience_,

one and unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by

criticism like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the

faculties of the soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in

truth, to assume the generalization of the fact itself as a means of

explanation. People reasoned thus: the sensations, the perceptions, the

intuitions at a certain moment are found imagined, that is to say,

changed in their form, therefore the imagination has transformed them.

To this class of inventions belongs the _moral conscience_, which was

accepted as a postulate of the ethical estimates, which are always

conditioned. The moral conscience which really exists is an empirical

fact; it is an index or a summary of the relative ethical formation of

each individual. If there can be in it material for science, this cannot

explain the ethical relations by means of the conscience, but the very

thing it needs is to understand how that conscience is formed.

If volitions are derived, and if morality results from the conditions of

life, ethics, in its completeness, is but a formation; its problem is

altogether pedagogic.

There is a pedagogy which I will call individualistic and subjective,

which, granted the generic conditions of human perfectibility,

constructs abstract rules by which men, who are still in a period of

formation, may be led to be strong, courageous, truthful, just,

benevolent, and so on through the entire extent of the cardinal or

secondary virtues. But again, can subjective pedagogy construct of

itself a social background upon which all these beautiful things ought

to be realized? If it constructs it, it simply elaborates a Utopia.

And, in truth, the human race, in the rigid course of its development,

never had time nor occasion to go to the school of Plato or of Owen, of

Pestalozzi or Herbart. It has done as it has been forced to do.

Considered in an abstract manner, all men can be educated and all are

perfectible; as a matter of fact, they have always been perfected and

instructed as much as and in the measure that they could, granted the

conditions of life in which they were obliged to develop. It is here

precisely that the word environment is not a metaphor, and that the use

of the word compact is not metaphorical. Real morality always presents

itself as something conditioned and limited, which the imagination has

sought to outgrow, by constructing Utopias, and by creating a

supernatural pedagogue, or a miraculous redemption.

Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and

the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant

relieve himself of his invincible superstitions, to which he was

condemned by his immediate dependence upon nature and his mediate

dependence upon a social mechanism unknown to him, and by his blind

faith in the priest, who stands to him as a magician and sorcerer. In

what fashion could the modern proletarian of the great industrial

cities, exposed continuously to the alternatives of misery or

subjection, how could he realize that way of living, regulated and

monotonous, which was the one suited to the members of the trade guilds,

whose existence seemed imbedded in a providential plan? From what

intuitive elements of experience could the hog merchant of Chicago, who

furnishes Europe with so many products at a cheap rate, extract the

conditions of serenity and intellectual elevation which gave to the

Athenian the qualities of the noble and good man, and to the Roman

citizen, the dignity of heroism? What power of docile Christian

persuasion will extract from the souls of the modern proletarians their

natural reasons of hate against their determined or undetermined

oppressors? If they wish that justice be done, they must appeal to

violence; and before the love of one's neighbor as a universal law can

appear possible to them, they must imagine a life very different from

the present life, which makes a necessity of hatred. In this society of

differentiations, hatred, pride, hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness,

injustice and all the catechism of the cardinal vices and their

accessories make a sad appendage to the morality, equal for all, upon

which they constitute the satire.

Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the

subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets

obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these

limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality

corresponds to the social situations, and, _in the last analysis_, to

the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual

morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic

situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically

irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and

also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does

not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment

and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the

development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his

class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of

the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of

_moral statistics_: the discipline which has thus far remained

incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations

groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases

(for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which,

as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say,

socially.

To recommend morality to men while assuming or ignoring their

conditions, this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of

all the catechists. To recognize that these are given by the social

environment, that is what the communists oppose to the utopia and the

hypocrisy of the preachers of morality. And as they see in morality not

a privilege of the elect, nor a gift of nature, but a result of

experience and education, they admit human perfectibility through

reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more moral and more

ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists.

In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity

generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves,

or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces

and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and

consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered

also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of

imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of

every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in

canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies,

once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they

finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they

took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative

rules and models.

The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort have given themselves

for centuries to this labor of abstraction, and have forced themselves

to maintain the resulting illusions. Now that the positive sources of

all ideologies have been found in the mechanism of life itself, we must

explain realistically their mode of generation. And as that is true of

all ideologies, it is true also and, in particular of those which

consist in projecting ethical estimates beyond their natural and direct

limits, making of them anticipations of divine announcements or

presuppositions of universal suggestions of conscience.

Therein lies the object of the special historic problems. We cannot

always find the tie which unites certain ethical ideas to practical

definite conditions. The concrete social psychology of past times often

remains impenetrable to us. Often the commonest things remain for us

unintelligible, for example, the animals considered as unclean, or the

origin for the repugnance at marriage between persons of remote degrees

of relationship. A prudent course of study leads us to conclude that the

motives of many details will remain always concealed. Ignorance,

superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are

causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now

constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable.

The principal cause of all difficulty is precisely in the tardy

appearance of what we call reason, so that the traces of the proximate

motives of ideas have been lost or have remained enveloped in the ideas

themselves.

On the subject of science we can be much more brief.

For a long time history has been made in an artless fashion. Granted and

admitted that the different sciences have their statements in manuals

and encyclopedias, it seemed sufficient to work out chronologically the

appearance of the different formulas, resolving the total of the

systematic summary into the elements which have successively served to

compose it. The general presupposition was simple enough; underneath

this chronology is the rational conception which develops and

progresses.

This method, if so it could be called, had within itself a certain

disadvantage; it permitted us at best to understand how, one stage of

science being granted, another stage of science may be derived from it

by reason, but it did not permit us to discern by what condition of

facts men were driven to discover science for the first time, that is to

say, to reduce considered experience into a new and definite form. The

question was, then, to find why there is an actual history of science,

to find the origin of the scientific necessity, and what unites in a

genetic fashion that necessity to our necessities in the continuity of

the social _processus_.

The great progress of modern technique, which really constitutes the

intellectual substance of the bourgeois epoch, has worked, among other

miracles, this one also, of revealing to us for the first time the

practical origin of the _scientific attitude_. (We can never forget the

Florentine Academy, which produced this phrase, when Italy was in the

twilight of its past grandeur and when modern society was in the dawn of

the great industry.) Henceforth we are in a position to take up the

guiding thread of what, by abstraction, is called the scientific spirit;

and no one is any longer astonished at finding that everything in

scientific discoveries has come about, as was the case in other

primitive times, when the clumsy elementary geometry of the Egyptians

arose from the necessity of measuring the fields exposed to the annual

inundations of the Nile, and when the periodicity of these inundations

suggested, in Egypt and in Babylon, the discovery of the rudiments of

the astronomical movements.

It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially

ripened, as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of

abstraction, of deduction and of combination continues among scientists

in such a way that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the

social causes of the first production of science itself. But if we

examine in their main features the epochs of the development of science,

and if we confront the periods which the ideologists would characterize

as periods of progress and of retrogression of intelligence, we perceive

clearly the social reason for the impulses, sometimes increasing,

sometimes decreasing, toward scientific activity. What need had the

feudal society of Western Europe for this ancient science, which the

Byzantines preserved, at least materially, while the Arabs, free

agriculturists, industrious artisans, or skillful merchants, had

succeeded in increasing it a little. What is the Renaissance, if not the

joining of the initiatory movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions

of ancient learning, which had become usable? What is all the

accelerated movement of scientific knowledge, since the seventeenth

century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence, refined by

experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved

technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? Thence

arises the war against darkness, superstition, the Church, religion;

thence arise naturalism, atheism, materialism; thence the installation

of the domain of reason. The bourgeois epoch is the epoch of minds in

full play. (Vico.) It is worth remembering that this government of the

Directory, which was the prototype and the compendium of all liberal

corruption, was the first to introduce in the University and at the

Academy in a formal and solemn fashion the science of free inquiry with

Lamark! This science, which the bourgeois epoch has, through its

inherent conditions, stimulated and made to grow like a giant, is the

only heritage of past centuries which communism accepts and adopts

without reserve.

It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called

antithesis between science and philosophy. If we accept those fashions

of philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology,

philosophy never means a science or doctrine separate from its

appropriate and particular things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a

stage of thought with relation to the things which enter into the domain

of experience. Philosophy is, then, either a generic anticipation of the

problems which science has still to elaborate specifically, or a summary

and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have

already arrived. As for those who, that they may not appear behind the

times, talk now of scientific philosophy, if we do not wish to stop over

the humorous element that there is in that expression, it will suffice

to say that they are simply fools.

I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic

structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great

part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the

production of art, of religion and of science. To express this

otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one's self voluntarily on

the road toward the absurd.

Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion,

that art, religion and science are subjective developments and

historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific

spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its

own rhythm of evolution, favored or retarded on this side or that by

material conditions. By this formula, it is desired to assert, moreover,

the necessary connection, through which every fact of art and of

religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic and thus derived, of

definite social conditions. If I say _in the second place_, it is to

distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order which

are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say

_in great part and indirectly the objects_ of these activities, it is to

indicate two things: that in artistic or religious production the

mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated, and

again that men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live

alone by themselves in nature, and to receive from it occasion and

material for curiosity and for imagination.

After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not

make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different

histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not

possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic

and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say

in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of

the things that have been produced, and the traditional repetition of a

definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things.

Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the _fables_ which are at

the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic

evolution where we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of

the Mediterranean, that is to say, from that phase of the higher

barbarism in which arises, in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to

imagine the birth and the development of Christianity elsewhere than in

Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than by the work of those

proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates, those desperate ones,

who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the promise of

the Kingdom of God. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing that in

the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should

begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Tasso;

or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of

Balzac, in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of

socialism and sociology, the _psychology of classes_. Far back, farther,

farther, at the first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident

that Zeus did not assume the characters of father of gods and men until

the power of the _patria potestas_ was already established, and that

series of _processus_ began which culminated in the State. Zeus thus

ceases to be what was at first the simple _divus_ (brilliant) or the

Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite point of

historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century

reduced to a single abstract God, who is a simple regent of the world,

all that variegated image of the unknown and transcendental type,

developed in so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan

creations. Man felt himself more at home in nature, thanks to

experience, but felt himself better able to penetrate the gearing of

society, the knowledge of which he possessed in part. The miraculous

dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism and criticism

could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism,

without taking up war against the gods.

There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the

vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from

things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude

of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the

projections which men have made of themselves and of their

economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of

their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious

concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy.

We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by

deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in

art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who

explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic

deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic.

Here I must state certain difficulties.

Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and

religion) to the social conditions which they idealize, one must first

acquire a long experience of specified social psychology, in which the

transformation is realized. Therein consists the justification of that

sum of relations, which is designated in another form of language, under

the name of Egyptian _world_, Greek _consciousness_, _spirit_ of the

Renaissance, _dominant ideas_, _psychology of nations_, of society or of

classes. When these relations are established, and men have become

accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of belief or of

imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become

crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations;

and as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through

writing, through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so

the struggle between the new and the old social conditions takes on the

form of a struggle between ideas.

In the second place, through the centuries of history properly

so-called, and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of

savagery and of the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in

which the majority of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in

what is traditional, and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as

obstinate survivals.

In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease to

live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals

are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one

understands, moreover, that a house is not a cave, that agriculture is

not natural pasturage, and that pharmacy is not exorcism. But nature is

always the immediate subsoil of the artificial groundwork, and it is the

environment which contains us. The industrial arts have put between us

social animals, and nature, certain intermediaries which modify, set

aside or remove the natural influences; but it has not for all that

destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually feel their effects.

And even as we are born men or women, as we die almost always in spite

of ourselves, and as we are dominated by the instinct of generation, so

we also bear in our temperament certain special conditions which

education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify,

it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress.

These conditions of temperament, repeated in infinite cases throughout

the centuries, constitute what is called the race. For all these

reasons, our dependence upon nature, although it has diminished since

prehistoric times, continues in our social life, just as the food which

the sight of nature affords to the curiosity and the imagination

continues also in our social life. Now these effects of nature, and the

sentiments immediate or mediate which result from it, although they have

been perceived, since history began, only on the visual angle which is

given us by the conditions of society, never fail to reflect themselves

in the products of art and of religion, and that adds to the

difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both.