ll the first social revolutions, men ideally transformed
their work, seeing in it the miraculous acts of gods and heroes. So much
so that, while acting as they could and as they must, granted the
necessity and the fact of their relative economic development, they
conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did not belong to
them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed since then
more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in relations
in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of the
ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and to _The
City of God_ of St. Augustine--from the superstitious credulity in
miracles down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is
to say, down to the _Idea_ which for the _decadents_ of Hegelianism
engenders of itself, in itself, by its own disaggregation the most
incongruous variations of social life in the course of history.

Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation
has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only
in our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has
been clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and
the more artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our
doctrine states a new problem and carries within itself grave
difficulties for whoever wishes to fit it for providing a specific
explanation of the history of the past.

The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new
criticism of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood
as speaking exclusively of the criticism of documents in the proper and
ordinary sense of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves
with what is delivered to us ready made by the critics, the scholars,
and the professional philologists. But I would speak of that immediate
source which is behind the so called documents properly and which,
before expressing itself and fixing itself in these, resides in the
spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which the actors
accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This spirit,
that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes
which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that
the actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions.
To strip the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very
facts