not lament over pauperism to eliminate it. It sheds tears over
nothing. The tears are transformed of themselves into a spontaneous
revolutionary force. Ethics and idealism consist henceforth in this, to
put the thought of science at the service of the proletariat. If this
ethics does not appear moral enough for the sentimentalists, usually
hysterical and silly, let them go and borrow altruism from its high
priest Spencer who will give a vague and insipid definition of it, such
as will satisfy them.

But, again, should the economic factor serve alone to explain the whole
of history!

Historic factors! But that is an expression of empiricists or
ideologists who repeat Herder. Society is a complex whole or an organism
according to the expression of some who waste their time in discussions
over the value and the analogical use of this expression. This
_complexus_ has formed itself and has changed several times. What is the
explanation of this change?

Even long before Feuerbach gave a final blow to the theological
explanation of history (man makes religion and not religion man) the
old Balzac[21] had made a satire of it by making men the puppets of God.
And had not Vico already recognized that Providence does not act in
history from without? And this same Vico, a century before Morgan, had
he not reduced history to a process which man himself makes through
successive experimentation consisting in the invention of language,
religion, customs and laws? Had not Lessing affirmed that history is an
education of the human race? Had not Rousseau seen that ideas are born
from needs? Had not Saint Simon guessed when he did not lose himself in
the distinction between organic and inorganic epochs the real genesis of
the Third Estate, and did not his ideas translated into prose make of
Augustin Thierry a reconstructor of historical research? In the first
fifty years of this century and notably in the period from 1830 to 1850
the class struggles which the ancient historians and those of Italy
during the Renaissance had described so clearly, instructed by the
experience of these struggles in the narrow domain of their own urban
republic had grown and had reached on both sides of the Channel greater
proportions and an evidence always more palpable. Born in the midst of
the great industry, illuminated by the recollection and by the study of
the French Revolution they have become intuitively instructive because
they found with more or