eagerness to explain to others what they themselves
only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only in its
beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed
they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were
considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it
thus to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for
scientific novelties, and other idle persons of the same type.

Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut
these prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions
and the tendencies underlying them, it must be remembered that the
meaning of this doctrine ought, before all else, to be drawn from the
position which it takes and occupies with regard to the doctrines
against which it is in reality opposed, and particularly with regard to
the ideologies of every sort;--that the proof of its value consists
exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate explanation of the
succession of human events which is derived from it;--that this doctrine
does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality or a
certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other
interests, but that it merely affirms the objective co-ordination and
subordination of all interests in the development of all society; and
this it affirms, thanks to that genetic _processus_ which consists in
going from the conditions to the conditioned, from the elements of
formation to the things formed.

Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word
_matter_ in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception,
or in so far as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum
of experience. We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or
biology; we are only searching for the explicit conditions of human
association in so far as it is no longer simply animal. It is not for us
to support our inductions or our deductions upon the data of biology,
but, on the contrary, to recognize before all else the peculiarities of
human association, which form and develop through the succession and the
growing perfection of the activity of man himself in given and variable
conditions, and to find the relations of co-ordination and
subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action.
It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a
criticism; it is m