. From the jealousy
of the gods of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Tame, an
infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as
complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators
by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Class tendencies,
religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a
current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an
artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all
these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the
substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is
implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to
flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether
they appeal to the providential direction of human events, or adhere to
the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and
often coarse conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is
frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these
conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of
immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course,
and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of
experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g., _chance_) or
with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e. g., the _inevitable
course of events_ which sometimes is confused in the mind with the
notion of progress) the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which
things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care
for our free will and our consent, that is the motive and the result of
this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which
by reason of its superficial character dissolves as soon as scientific
criticism appears.

In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of
criticism appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe
thought, but which often seem to "cultured people" the _non plus ultra_
of intelligence,--in all these a great part of the human _processus_ is
revealed and reflected; and, consequently, we should not consider them
as gratuitous inventions nor as products of a momentary illusion. They
are a part and a moment in the development of what we call the human
mind. If later it is observed that these concepts and these imaginings
are mingled and confounded in the ac