erely the necessity arising from the facts that must
be put in evidence.

And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act
otherwise, satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn,
give rise to others in their upward development, and as for the
satisfaction of their needs, whatever they may be, they invent and
employ certain means and certain tools and associate themselves in
certain definite fashions, the materialism of historical interpretation
is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method
the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through
the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ from that of all
the other doctrines which after many excursions through the domains of
the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching the
prose of reality and halting there.

II.

There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal
vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may,
however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and
popular effects I will call it _phraseology_, although this word is not
an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin.

For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have
illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more
immediately practical to the interests purely aesthetic, have moved
different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition.
These different types have always taken birth in different countries
long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state
and of the passage from the primitive communist society to the society
which rests upon class differences and class antagonisms. The
historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always
born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very
complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this
complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten.
This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and
which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various
vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious
and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some
sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged
to add certain general views to the simple narration