,--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