University of Virginia Library

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 duality, 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 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.